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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/eighteenchristia02whit 



THE 



Eighteen Christian Centuries. 



THE REV. JAMES WHITE, 

AUTHOR OF A "HISTORY OF FRANCE." 



Wi\ k Cjopw $ite. 



FROM THE SECOND EDINBURGH EDITION. 



PHILADELPHIA: 

PARRY & M C MILLAN. 

1859. 



J] /03 






STEREOTYPED BY L. JOHNSON &. CO. 
PHILADELPHIA. 



COLLINS, PRINTER. 




NOTE BY THE AMERICAN PUBLISHERS. 



This valuable work, which has been received with 
much favour in Great Britain, is reprinted without 
abridgment from the second Edinburgh edition. The 
lists of names of remarkable persons in the present 
issue have been somewhat enlarged, and additional 
dates appended, thereby increasing the value of the 
book. 



CONTENTS. 



FIRST CENTURY. 

PAGE 

THE BAD EMPERORS 9 



SECOND CENTURY. 

THE GOOD EMPERORS 41 

THIRD CENTURY. 

ANARCHY AND CONFUSION — GROWTH OP THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. 65 

FOURTH CENTURY. 

THE REMOVAL TO CONSTANTINOPLE — ESTABLISHMENT OF CHRIS- 
TIANITY — APOSTASY OF JULIAN — SETTLEMENT OF THE GOTHS... 83 

FIFTH CENTURY. 

END OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE — FORMATION OF MODERN STATES — 

GROWTH OF ECCLESIASTICAL AUTHORITY 105 

SIXTH CENTURY. 

BELISARIUS AND NARSES IN ITALY — SETTLEMENT OF THE LOM- 
BARDS — LAWS OF JUSTINIAN — BIRTH OF MOHAMMED 123 

1* 5 






CONTENTS. 



SEVENTH CENTURY. 

PAGB 

POWER OF HOME SUPPORTED BY THE MONKS — CONQUESTS OF THE 

MOHAMMEDANS 141 



EIGHTH CENTURY. 

TEMPORAL POWER OF THE POPES — THE EMPIRE OF CHARLEMAGNE. 171 

NINTH CENTURY. 

DISMEMBERMENT OF CHARLEMAGNE'S EMPIRE — DANISH INVASION 

OF ENGLAND — WEAKNESS OF FRANCE — REIGN OF ALFRED 193 

TENTH CENTURY. 

DARKNESS AND DESPAIR 219 

ELEVENTH CENTURY. 

THE COMMENCEMENT OF IMPROVEMENT — GREGORY THE SEVENTH — 

FIRST CRUSADE 241 

TWELFTH CENTURY. 

ELEVATION OF LEARNING — POWER OF THE CHURCH — THOMAS 

A-BECKETT 269 

THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 

FIRST CRUSADE AGAINST HERETICS — THE ALBIGENSES — MAGNA 

CHARTA — EDWARD 1 297 

FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 

ABOLITION OF THE ORDER OF THE TEMPLARS — RISE OF MODERN 

LITERATURES — SCHISM OF THE CHURCH 325 



CONTENTS. 7 

FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 

PAGK 

DECLINE OF FEUDALISM — AGINCOURT — JOAN OF ARC — THE PRINT- 
ING-PRESS — DISCOVERY OF AMERICA 359 

SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 

THE REFORMATION — THE JESUITS — POLICY OF ELIZABETH 401 

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

ENGLISH REBELLION AND REVOLUTION — DESPOTISM OF LOUIS THE 

FOURTEENTH 447 

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

INDIA — AMERICA — FRANCE 491 

INDEX 527 



FIRST CENTURY. 



A.D. 



ISmperoris, 



Augustus Caesar. 

14. Tiberius. 

37. Caius Caligula. 

41. Claudius. 

54. Nero. First Persecution of the Christian 

68. Galba. 

69. Otho. 
69. Vitellius. 
69. Vespasian. 
79. Titus. 

81. Domitian. Second Persecution of the Christians. 

96. Nerya. 

98. Trajan. 

Enters* 

Livy, Ovid, Tibullus, Strabo, Columella, Quintus Curtius, 
Seneca, Lucan, Petronius, Silius Italicus, Pliny the Elder, 
Martial, Quinctilian, Tacitus. 

<£J)rigttatt dFatfjers anti W&xitm. 

Barnabas, Clement of Eome, Hermas, Ignatius, Polycarp. 



THE 



EIGHTEEN CHRISTIAN CENTURIES. 



THE FIEST CENTUEY. 

THE BAD EMPERORS. 

Nobody disputes the usefulness of History. Many 
prefer it, even for interest and amusement, to the best 
novels and romances. But the extent of time over which 
it has stretched its range is appalling to the most labo- 
rious of readers. And as History is growing every day, 
and every nation is engaged in the manufacture of 
memorable events, it is pitiable to contemplate the fate 
of the historic student a hundred years hence. He is 
not allowed to cut off at one end, in proportion as he in- 
creases at the other. He is not allowed to forget Marl- 
borough, in consideration of his accurate acquaintance 
with Wellington. His knowledge of the career of 
Napoleon is no excuse for ignorance of Julius Csesar. 
All must be retained — victories, defeats — battles, sieges 
— knights in armour, soldiers in red; the charge at 
Marathon, the struggle at Inkermann — all these things, 
a thousand other things, at first apparently of no import- 
ance, but growing larger and larger as time develops 
their effects, till men look back in wonder that the acorn 

escaped their notice which has produced such a majestic 

11 



12 FIRST CENTURY. 

oak, — a thousand other things still, for a moment rising 
in apparently irresistible power, and dying off apparently 
without cause, must be folded up in niches of the memory, 
ready to be brought forth when needed, and yet room be 
left for the future. And who can pretend to be qualified 
for so great a work ? Most of us confess to rather dim 
recollections of things occurring in our own time, — in 
our own country — in our own parish; and some, con- 
templating the vast expanse of human history, its in- 
numerable windings and perplexing variations, are in- 
clined to give it up in despair, and have a sulky sort of 
gratification in determining to know nothing, since they 
cannot know all. All kings, they say, are pretty much 
alike, and whether he is called John in England, or Louis 
in France, doesn't make much difference. Nobles also 
are as similar as possible, and peoples are everywhere 
the same. Now, this, you see, though it ambitiously 
pretends to be ignorance, is, in fact, something infinitely 
worse. It is false knowledge. It might be very injurious 
to liberty, to honour, and to religion itself, if this wretched 
idea were to become common, for where would be the 
inducement to noble endeavour ? to reform of abuses ? 
to purity of life? Kings and nobles and peoples are not 
everywhere the same. They are not even like each 
other, or like themselves in the same land at different 
periods. They are in a perpetual series, not only of 
change, but of contrast. They are "variable as the sea," 
— calm and turbulent, brilliant and dark by turns. And 
it is this which gives us the only chance of attaining 
clearness and distinctness in our historic views. It is by 
dissimilarities that things are individualized: now, how 
pleasant it would be if wo could simplify and strengthen 
our recollections of different times, by getting per- 
sonal portraits, as it were, of the various centuries, so as 
to escape the danger of confounding their dress or fea- 



CENTURIES DISTINGUISHED. 13 

tures. It would be impossible in that case to mistake 
the Spanish hat and feather of the sixteenth century for 
the steel helmet and closed vizor of the fourteenth. We 
should be able, in the same way, to distinguish between 
the modes of thought and principles of action of the 
early ages, and those of the present time. We should 
be able to point out anachronisms of feeling and manners 
if they occurred in the course of our reading, as well as 
of dress and language. It is surely worth while, there- 
fore, to make an attempt to individualize the centuries, 
not by affixing to them any arbitrary marks of one's 
own, but by taking notice of the distinguishing quality 
they possess, and grouping round that, as a centre, the 
incidents which either produce this characteristic or are 
produced by it. What should we call the present cen- 
tury, for instance? We should at once name it the 
Century of Invention. The great war with Napoleon 
ending in 1815, exciting so many passions, and calling 
forth such energy, was but the natural introduction to 
the wider efforts and amazing progress of the succeeding 
forty years. Battles and bulletins, alliances and quarrels, 
ceased, but the intellect aroused by the struggle dashed 
into other channels. Commerce spread its humanizing 
influences over hitherto closed and unexplored regions ; 
the steamboat and railway began their wondrous career. 
The lightning was trained to be our courier in the electric 
telegraph, and the sun took our likenesses in the daguer- 
reotype. How changed this century is in all its attri- 
butes and tendencies from its predecessor, let any man 
judge for himself, who compares the reigns of our first 
Hanoverian kings with that of our gracious queen. 

In nothing, indeed, is the course of European history 
so remarkable as in the immense differences which in- 
tervals of a few years introduce. In the old monarchies 
of Asia, time and the world seem almost to stand still. 

2 



14 FIRST CENTURY. 

The Indian, the Arab, the Chinese of a thousand years 
ago, wore the same clothes, thought the same thoughts, 
and led the same life as his successor of to-day. But 
with us the whole character of a people is changed in a 
lifetime. In a few years we are whirled out of all our as- 
sociations. Names perhaps remain unaltered, but the 
inner life is different ; modes of living, states of educa- 
tion, religious sentiments, great national events, foreign 
wars, or deep internal struggles — all leave such inefface- 
able marks on the history of certain periods, that their 
influence can be traced through all the particulars of the 
time. The art of printing can be followed, on its first 
introduction, into the recesses of private life, as well as 
in the intercourse of nations. The Eeformation of re- 
ligion so entirely altered the relations which the states 
of the world bore to each other, that it may be said to 
have put a limit between old history and new, so that 
human character itself received a new development ; and 
actions, both public and private, were regulated by 
principles hitherto unknown. 

In one respect all the past centuries are alike, — that 
they have done their part towards the formation of this. 
We bear the impress, at this hour, of the great thoughts 
and high aspirations, the struggles, and even the crimes, 
of our ancestral ages ; and yet they have no greater re- 
semblance to the present, except in the unchangeable 
characteristics of human nature itself, than the remotest 
forefathers in a long line of ancestry, whose likenesses 
hang in the galleries of our hereditary nobles, bear to the 
existing owner of title and estate. The ancestor who 
fought in the wars of the Eoses has a very different ex- 
pression and dress from the other ancestor who cheated 
and lied (politically, of course) in the days of the early 
Georges. Yet from both the present proprietor is de- 
scended. He retains the somewhat rusty armour on an 



CENTURIES DISTINGUISHED. 15 

ostentatious nail in the hall, and the somewhat insincere 
memoirs in a secret drawer in the library, and we can- 
not deny that he is the joint production of the courage 
of the warrior and the duplicity of the statesman; 
anxious to defend what he believes to be the right, like 
the supporter of York or Lancaster — but trammelled 
by the ties of party, like the patriot of Sir Eobert Wal- 
pole. 

If we could affix to each century as characteristic a 
presentment as those portraits do of the steel-clad hero 
of Towton, or the be-wigged, be-buckled courtier of 
George the Second, our object would be gained. We 
should see a whole history in a glance at a century's 
face. If it were peculiarly marked by nature or accident, 
so much the more easy would it be to recognise the like- 
ness. If the century was a warlike, quarrelsome century, 
and had scars across its brow ; if it was a learned, plod- 
ding century, and wore spectacles on nose ; if it was a 
frivolous, gay century, and simpered forever behind 
bouquets of flowers, or tripped on fantastic toe with a 
jewelled rapier at its side, there would be no mistaking 
the resemblance ; there would also be no chance of con- 
fusing the actions : the legal century would not fight, the 
dancing century would not depose its king. 

Taking our stand at the beginning of our era, there 
are only eighteen centuries with which we have to do, 
and how easily any of us get acquainted with the features 
and expression of eighteen of our friends ! Not that we 
know every particular of their birth and education, or 
can enter into the minute parts of their character and 
feelings j but we soon know enough of them to distinguish 
them from each other. We soon can say of which of the 
eighteen such or such an action or opinion is charac- 
teristic. We shall not mistake the bold deed or eloquent 
statement of one as proceeding from another. 



16 FIRST CENTURY. 

"Boastful and rough, your first son is a squire. 
The next a tradesman, meek, and much a liar : 
Tom struts a soldier, open, bold, and brave : 
Will sneaks a scrivener, an exceeding knave. 
Is he a churchman ? then he's fond of power : 
A Quaker ? sly : a Presbyterian ? sour : 
A smart free-thinker? all things in an hour." 

Now, though it is impossible to put the characteristics 
of a whole century into such terse and powerful language 
as this, it cannot be doubted that each century, or con- 
siderable period, has its prevailing Thought, — a thought 
which it works out in almost all the ramifications of its 
course ; which it receives from its predecessor in a totally 
different shape, and passes on to its successor in a still 
more altered form. Else why do we find the faith of one 
generation the ridicule and laughing-stock of the next ? 
How did knighthood rise into the heroic regions of 
chivalry, and then sink in a succeeding period into the 
domain of burlesque ? How did aristocracy in one ago 
concentrate into kingship in another ? And in a third, 
how did the golden ring of sovereignty lose its con- 
trolling power, and republics take their rise ? How did 
the reverence of Europe settle at one time on the sword 
of Edward the Third, and at another on the periwig of 
Louis the Fourteenth ? These and similar inquiries 
will lead us to the real principles and motive forces of a 
particular age, as they distinguished it from other ages. 
We shall label the centuries, as it were, with their 
characteristic marks, and know where to look for 
thoughts and incidents of a particular class and type. 

Let us look at the first century. 

Throughout the civilized world there is nothing but 
Borne. Under whatever form of government — under 
consuls, or triumvirs, or dictators — that wonderful city 
was mistress of the globe. Her internal dissensions had 
not weakened her power. While her streets were 



BIRTH OF CHRIST. 17 

running with the blood of her citizens, her eagles were 
flying triumphant in Farther Asia and on the Ehine. 
Her old constitution had finally died off almost without 
a blow, and unconsciously the people, still talking of 
Cato and Brutus, became accustomed to the yoke. For 
seven-and-twenty years they had seen all the power of 
the state concentrated in one man; but the names of the 
offices of which their ancestors had been so proud were 
retained ; and when Octavius, the nephew of the con- 
queror Julius Caesar, placed himself above the law, it was 
only by uniting in his own person all the authority 
which the law had created. He was consul, tribune, 
prastor, pontifex, imperator, — whatever denomination 
conferred dignity and power ; and by the legal exercise 
of all these trusts he had no rival and no check. He 
was finally presented by the senate with the lofty title 
of Augustus, which henceforth had a mysterious signifi- 
cance as the seal of imperial greatness, and his commands 
were obeyed without a murmur from the Tigris to the 
Tyne. But whilst in the enjoyment of this pre-eminence, 
the Eoman emperor was unconscious that in a village 
of Judea, in the lowest rank of life, among the most 
contemned tribe of his dominions, his Master was 
"" born. By this event the whole current of the 
world's history was changed. The great became small 
and the small great. Eome itself ceased to be the capital 
of the world, for men's eyes and hearts, when the won- 
derful story came to be known, were turned to Jeru- 
salem. From her, commissioned emissaries were to pro- 
ceed with greater powers than those of Eoman prsetors 
or governors. From her gates went forth Peter and 
John to preach the gospel. Down her steep streets rode 
Paul and his companions, breathing anger against the 
Church, and ere they reached Damascus, behold, the 
eyes of the persecutor are blinded with lightning, and 
B 2* 



18 FIRST CENTURY. 

his understanding illuminated with the same flash ; and 
henceforth he proceeds, in lowliness and humility, to 
convey to others the glad tidings that had been revealed 
to himself. Away in all directions, but all radiating 
from Jerusalem, travelled the messengers of the amaz- 
ing dispensation. Everywhere — in all centuries — in all 
regions, we shall encounter the results of their ministry; 
and as we watch the swelling of the mighty tide, first 
of Christian faith and then of priestly ambition, which 
overspread the fairest portions of the globe, we shall 
wonder more and more at the apparent powerlessness 
of its source, and at the vast effects for good and evil 
which it has produced upon mankind. 

What were they doing at Rome during the thirty- 
three years of our Saviour's sojourn upon earth ? For 
the first fourteen of them Augustus was gathering 
round him. the wits, and poets, and sages, who have 
, . made his reign immortal. After that date his 

A.D. 14. 

successor, Tiberius, built up by stealthy and slow 
degrees the most dreadful tyranny the world had ever 
seen, — a tyranny the results of which lasted long after 
the founders of it had expired. For from this period 
mankind had nothing to hope but from the bounty of 
the emperor. It is humiliating to reflect that the his- 
tory of the world for so long a period consists of the 
deeds and dispositions of the successive rulers of Rome. 
All men, wherever their country, or whatever their 
position, were dependent, in greater or less degree, for 
their happiness or misery on the good or bad temper of 
an individual man. If he was cruel, as so many of them 
were, he filled the patricians of Rome with fear, and 
terrified the distant inhabitants of Thrace or Gaul. His 
benevolence, on the other hand, was felt at the extremi- 
ties of the earth. No wonder that every one was on 
the watch for the first glimpse of a new emperor's 



POWER OF THE EMPEROR. 19 

character and disposition. "What rejoicings in Italy and 
Greece and Africa, and all through Europe, when a trait 
of goodness was reported ! and what a sinking of the 
heart when the old story was renewed, and a monster 
of cruelty succeeded to a monster of deceit ! For the 
fearfullest thing in all the descriptions of Tiberius is the 
duplicity of his behaviour. He withdrew to an island in 
the sunniest part of the Mediterranean, and covered it 
with gorgeous buildings, and supplied it with all the im- 
plements of luxury and enjoyment. From this magnifi- 
cent retirement he uttered a whisper, or made a motion 
with his hand, which displaced an Eastern monarch 
from his throne, or doomed a senator to death. He was 
never seen. He lived in the dreadful privacy of some 
fabled deity, and was only felt at the farthest ends of 
his empire by the unhappiness he occasioned; by his 
murders, and imprisonments, and every species of suffer- 
ing, men's hearts and minds were bowed down beneath 
this invisible and irresistible oppressor. Self-respect 
was at an end, and liberty was not even wished for. The 
emperor had swallowed up the empire, and there was no 
authority or influence beside. This is the main feature 
of the first or Imperial Century, that, wherever we 
look, we see but one, — one gorged and bloated brutalized 
man, sitting on the throne of earthly power, and all the 
rest of mankind at his feet. Humanity at its flower had 
culminated into a Tiberius ; and when at last he was 
slain, and the world began to breathe, the sorrow was 
speedily deeper than before, for it was found that 
the Imperial tree had blossomed again, and that 
its fruit was a Caligula. 

This was a person with much the same taste for blood 
as his predecessor, but he was more open in the gratifi- 
cation of this propensity. He did not wait for trial 
and sentence, — those dim mockeries of justice in which 



20 FIRST CENTURY. 

Tiberius sometimes indulged. He had a peculiar way 
of nodding with his head or pointing with his finger, 
and the executioner knew the sign. The man he nodded 
to died. For the more distinguished of the citizens he 
kept a box, — not of snuff, like some monarchs of the 
present day, but of some strong and instantaneous 
poison. Whoever refused a pinch died as a traitor, and 
whoever took one died of the fatal drug. Even the 
degenerate Romans could not endure this long, and 
,„ Chscreas, an officer of his guard, put him to 

A.D. 41. 7 . . 

death, after a sanguinary reign of four years. 
Still the hideous catalogue goes on. Claudius, a 
nephew of Tiberius, is forced upon the unwilling senate 
by the spoilt soldiers of the capital, the Praetorian 
Guards. Colder, duller, more brutal than the rest, 
Claudius perhaps increased the misery of his country by 
the apathy and stupidity of his mind. The other tyrants 
had some limit to their wickedness, for they kept all the 
powers of the State in their own hands, but this man 
enlisted a countless host of favourites and courtiers in 
his crusade against the happiness of mankind. Badly 
eminent among these was his wife, the infamous Messa- 
lina, whose name has become a symbol of all that is de- 
testable in the female sex. Some people, indeed, in 
reading the history of this period, shut the book with a 
shudder, and will not believe it true. They prefer to 
think that authors of all lands and positions have agreed 
to paint a fancy picture of depravity and horror, than 
that such things were. But the facts are too well 
proved to be doubted. We see a dull, unimpassioned, 
moody despot; fond of blood, but too indolent to shed it 
himself, unless at the dictation of his fiendish partner 
and her friends; so brutalized that nothing amazed or 
disturbed him; so unobservant that, relying on his 
blindness, Bhe wenl through the ostentatious ceremony 



CLAUDIUS. 21 

of a public marriage with one of her paramours during 
the lifetime, almost under the eyes, of her husband ; and 
yet to this frightful combination of ferocity and stupidity 
England owes its subjection to the Eoman power, and 
all the blessings which Eoman civilization — bringing as 
it did the lessons of Christianity in its train — was calcu- 
lated to bestow. In the forty-fourth year of this cen- 
tury, and the third year of the reign of Claudius, Aulus 
Plautius landed in Britain at the head of a powerful 
army; and the tide of Victory and Settlement never 
subsided till the whole country, as far north as the Sol- 
way, submitted to the Eagles. The contrast between 
the central power at Rome, and the officials employed 
at a distance, continued for a long time the most re- 
markable circumstance in the history of the empire. 
Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, vied with each other in ex- 
citing the terror and destroying the happiness of the 
world ; but in the remote extremities of their command, 
their generals displayed the courage and virtue of an 
earlier age. They improved as well as conquered. 
They made roads, and built bridges, and cut down 
woods. They established military stations, which soon 
became centres of education and law. They deepened 
the Thames, and commenced those enormous embank- 
ments of the river, to which, in fact, London owes its 
existence, without being aware of the labour they be- 
stowed upon the work. If by some misfortune a great 
fissure took place — as has occurred on a small scale 
once before — in these artificial dikes, it would task the 
greatest skill of modern engineers to repair the damage. 
They superseded the blood-stained ceremonies of the 
Druids with the more refined worship of the heathen 
deities, making Claudius himself a tutelary god, with 
priest and temple, in the town of Colchester ) and this, 
though in our eyes the deification of one of the worst 



22 FIRST CENTURY. 

of men, was, perhaps, in the estimation of our predeces- 
sors, only the visible embodiment of settled government 
and beneficent power. But murder and treachery, and 
unspeakable iniquity, went their way as usual in the 
city of the Caesars. Messalina was put to death, and 
another disgrace to womanhood, in the person of Agrip- 
pina, took her place beside the phlegmatic tyrant. 
Thirteen years had passed, when the boundary of human 
patience was attained, and Borne was startled one 
morning with the joyful news that her master was no 
more. The combined cares of his loving spouse and a 
favourite physician had produced this happy result, — the 
one presenting him with a dish of deadly mushrooms, 

and the other painting his throat for a hoarseness 

with a poisoned feather. 
Is there no hope for Eome or for mankind ? Is there 
to be a perpetual succession of monster after monster, 
with no cessation in the dreadful line ? It would be 
pleasant to conceal for a minute or two the name of the 
next emperor, that we might point to the glorious pros- 
pect now opening on the world. But the name has 
become so descriptive that deception is impossible. 
When the word Nero is said, little more is required. 
But it was not so at first ; a brilliant sunrise never had 
so terrible a course, or so dark a setting. "We still see 
in the earlier statues which remain of him the fine out- 
line of his face, and can fancy what its expression must 
have been before the qualities of his heart had stamped 
their indelible impression on his features. For the first 
five years of his reign the world seemed lost as much in 
surprise as in admiration. Some of his actions were 
generous; none of them were cruel or revengeful. lie 
was young, and seemed anxious to fulfil the duties of his 
position. But power and flattery had their usual effect. 
All that was good in him was turned into evil. He 



NERO. 23 

tortured the noblest of the citizens j and degraded the 
throne to such a degree by the expositions he made of 
himself, sometimes as a musician on the stage, some- 
times as a charioteer in the arena, that if there had 
been any Eomans left they would have despised the 
tyrant more than they feared him. But there were no 
Eomans left. The senators, the knights, the populace, 
vied with each other in submission to his power and 
encouragement of his vices. The rage of the monster, 
once excited, knew no bounds. He burned the city in 
the mere wantonness of crime, and fixed the blame on 
the unoffending Christians. These, regardless of age or 
condition or sex, he destroyed by every means in his 
power. He threw young maidens into the amphitheatre, 
where the hungry tigers leapt out upon them; he ex- 
posed the aged professors of the gospel to fight in 
single combat with the trained murderers of the circus, 
called the Gladiators; and once, in ferocious mockery 
of human suffering, he enclosed whole Christian families 
in a coating of pitch and other inflammable materials, 
and, setting fire to the covering, pursued his sport all 
night by the light of these living flambeaux. Some of 
his actions it is impossible to name. It will be suffi- 
cient to say that at the end of thirteen years the purple 
he disgraced was again reddened with blood. Terrified 
at the opposition that at last rose against him — de- 
serted, of course, by the confederates of his wickedness 
— shrinking with unmanly cowardice from a defence 
which might have put off the evil day, he fled and hid 
himself from his pursuers. Agonized with fear, howling 
with, repentant horror, he was indebted to one of his 
attendants for the blow which his own cowardly hand 
cou.d not administer, and he died the basest, lowest, and 
most pitiless of all the emperors. And all those hopes 
he lad disappointed, and all those iniquities he had per- 



24 FIRST CENTURY. 

petrated, at the age of thirty-two. He was the last of 
the line of Csesar; and if that conqueror had foreseen 
that in so few years after his death the Senate of 
Eome would have been so debased, and the people of 
Eome so brutalized, he would have pardened to Brutus 
the precautionary blow which was intended to prevent 
so great a calamity. 

Galba was elected to fill his place, and was mur- 

A.D. bo. x ' 

dered in a few months. 

The degraded praetorians then elevated one of tho 

companions of Nero's guilty excesses to the throne in 

the person of Otho, but resistance was made to their 

„ n selection. The forces in Germany nominated 

A.D. 69. J 

Yitellius to the supreme authority; and Otho, 
either a voluptuary tired of life, or a craven incapable 
of exertion, committed suicide to save the miseries of 
civil war. But this calamity was averted by a nobler 
hand. Yitellius had only time to show that, in addition 
to the usual vices of the throne, he was addicted to the 
animal enjoyments of eating and drinking to an almost 
incredible degree, when he heard a voice from the walls 
of Jerusalem which hurled him from the seat he had so 
lately taken; for the legions engaged in that most 
memorable of sieges had decided on giving the empire 
of the world to the man who deserved it best, and had 
proclaimed their general, Flavius Yespasian, Imperator 
and Master of Eome. 
Now we will pause, for we have come to the year 
seventy of this century, and a fit breathing-time 
to look round us and see what condition mankind 
has fallen into within a hundred years of the end of the 
Eepublic. We leave out of view the great empires of 
the farther East, where battles were won, and dynteties 
established on the plains of Hindostan, and within the 
Chinese Wall. The extent of our knowledge of Oriental 



SAVAGE TRIBES. 25 

affairs is limited to the circumference of the Roman power. 
Following that vast circle, we see it on all sides sur- 
rounded by tribes and nations who derive their sole illu- 
mination from its light, for unless the Roman conquests 
had extended to the confines of those barbaric states, we 
should have known nothing of their existence. Beyond 
that ring of fire it is almost matter of conjecture what 
must have been going on. Yet we learn from the tradi- 
tions of many peoples, and can guess with some accu- 
racy from the occurrences of a later period, what was 
the condition of those " outsiders/' and what were their 
feelings and intentions with regard to the civilized por- 
tions of the world. Bend your eyes in any direction you 
please, and what names, what thoughts, suggest them- 
selves to our minds ! We see swarms of wild adven- 
turers with wives and cattle traversing with no definite 
object the uncultivated districts beyond the Danube; 
occasionally pitching their tents, or even forming more 
permanent establishments, around the roots of Caucasus 
and north of the Caspian Sea, where grass was more 
plentiful, and hills or marshes formed an easily defended 
barrier against enemies as uncivilized as themselves. 
Coming from no certain region — that is, forgetting in a 
few years of wandering the precise point from which 
they set out, pushed forward by the advancing waves of 
great national migrations in their rear — moving onward 
across the upper fields of Europe, but keeping themselves 
still cautiously from actual contact with the Roman limits, 
from those hordes of homeless, lawless savages are de- 
rived the most polished and greatest nations of the pre- 
sent day. Forming into newer combinations, and taking 
different names, their identity is scarcely to be recognised 
when, three or four centuries after this, they come 
into the daylight of history; but nobody can doubt that, 
during these preliminary ages, they were gathering their 

3 



26 FIRST CENTURY. 

power together, hereafter, under the impulse of fresh 
additions, to be hurled like a dammed-up river upon the 
prostrate realm, carrying ruin and destruction in their 
course, but no less certainly than the overflowing Nile 
leaving the germs of future fertility, and enriching with 
newer vegetation the fields they had so ruthlessly sub- 
merged. And year by year the mighty mass goes on 
accumulating. The northern plains become peopled no 
one knows how. The vast forests eastward of the Ehine 
receive new accessions of warriors, who rapidly assimi- 
late with the old. United in one common object of re- 
taining the wild freedom of their tribe, and the posses- 
sion of the lands, they have seized, they have opposed 
the advance of the Roman legions into the uncultivated 
districts they call their own; they have even succeeded 
in destroying the military forces which guarded the 
Ehine, and have with difficulty been restrained from 
crossing the great river by a strong line of forts and 
castles, of which the remains astonish the traveller of 
the present day, as, with Murray's Guide-Book in his 
hand, he gazes upon their ruins between Bingen and 
Aix-la-Chapelle. 

Repelled by these barriers, they cluster thicker than 
ever in the woods and valleys, to which the Romans 
have no means of penetrating. Southern Gaul submits, 
and becomes a civilized outpost of the central power; 
but far up in the wild regions of the north, and even to 
the eastward of the Gulfs of Bothnia and Finland, the 
assemblage goes on. Scandinavia itself becomes over- 
crowded by the perpetual arrival of thousands of these 
armed and expatriated families, and sends her teeming 
populations to the east and south. But all these incidents, 
I must remind you, are occurring in darkness. We only 
know that the desert is becoming peopled with crowded 
millions, and that among them all there floats a confused 



VESPASIAN. 27 

notion of the greatness of the Eoman power, the wealth 
of the cities and plains of Italy; and that, clustering in 
thicker swarms on the confines of civil government, the 
watchful eyes of unnumbered savage warriors are fixed 
on the territories lying rich and beautiful within the 
protection of the Eoman name. So the whole Eoman 
boundary gets gradually surrounded by barbaric hosts. 
Their trampings may be heard as they marshal their 
myriads and skirt the upper boundaries of Thrace j but 
as yet no actual conflict has occurred. A commotion 
may become observable among some of the farthest dis- 
tant of the half intimidated of the German tribes j or 
an enterprising Eoman settler beyond the frontier, or 
travelling merchant, who has penetrated to the neigh- 
bourhood of the Baltic, may bring back amazing reports 
of the fresh accumulations of unknown hordes of strange 
and threatening aspect; but the luxurious public in 
Eome receive them merely as interesting anecdotes to 
amuse their leisure or gratify their curiosity : they have 
no apprehension of what maybe the result of those mul- 
titudinous arrivals. They do not foresee the gradual 
drawing closer to their outward defences — the struggle 
to get within their guarded lines — the fight that is surely 
coming between a sated, dull, degraded civilization on 
the one side, and a hungry, bold, ambitious savagery on 
the other. They trust every thing to the dignity of the 
Eternal City, and the watchfulness of the Emperor : for 
to this, his one idea of irresistible power equally for 
good or evil, the heart of the Eoman was sure to turn. 
And for the eleven years of the reigns of Yespasian and 
Titus, the Eoman did not appeal for protection against 
a foreign enemy in vain. Eome itself was compensated 
by shows and buildings — with a triumph and an arch — 
for the degradation in which it was held. But praetor 
and proconsul still pursued their course of oppressing 



28 FIRST CENTURY. 

the lands committed to their defence; and the subject, 
stripped of his goods, and hopeless of getting his wrongs 
redressed, had only the satisfaction of feeling that the 
sword he trembled at was in the hand of a man and not 
of an incarnate demon. A poor consolation this when 
the blow was equally fatal. Yespasian, in fact, was 
fonder of money than of blood, and the empire rejoiced 
in having exchanged the agony of being murdered 
' for the luxury of being fleeced. With Titus, whom 
the fond gratitude of his subjects named the Delight of 
the human race, a new age of happiness was about to 
open on the world ; but all the old horrors of the Csesars 
were revived and magnified when he was succeeded, 
after a reign of two years, by his brother, the 
savage and cowardly Domitian. "With the excep- 
tion of the brief period between the years 70 and 81, the 
whole century was* spent in suffering and inflicting pain. 
The worst excesses of Nero and Caligula were now 
imitated and surpassed. The bonds of society became 
rapidly loosened. As in a shipwreck, the law of self- 
preservation was the only rule. JSTo man could rely 
upon his neighbour, or his friend, or his nearest of kin. 
There were spies in every house, and an executioner at 
every door. An unconsidered word maliciously reported, 
or an accusation entirely false, brought death to the rich 
and great. To the unhappy class of men who in other 
times are called the favourites of fortune, because they 
are born to the possession of great ancestral names and 
hereditary estates, there was no escape from the jealous 
and avaricious hatred of the Emperor. If a patrician 
of this description lived in the splendour befitting his rank 
— he was currying favour with the mob ! If he lived re- 
tired — he was trying to gain reputation by a pretence of 
giving up the world ! If he had great talents — he was 
dangerous to the state ! If he was dull and stupid — oh ! 



ITS DREADFUL CHARACTER. 2 'J 

don't believe it — he was only an imitative Brutus, con- 
cealing his deep designs under the semblance of fatuity ! 
If a man of distinguished birth was rich, it was not a 
fitting condition for a subject — if he was poor, he was 
likely to be seduced into the wildest enterprises. So 
the prisons were filled by calumny and suspicion, and 
emptied by the executioner. A dreadful century this — 
the worst that ever entered into tale or history; for the 
memory of former glories and comparative freedom was 
still recent. A man who was sixty years old, in the 
midst of the terrors of Tiberius, had associated in his 
youth with the survivors of the Civil War, with men 
who had embraced Brutus and Cassius; he had seen the 
mild administration of Augustus, and perhaps had supped 
with Yirgil and Horace in the house of Maecenas. And 
now he was tortured till he named a slave or freedman 
of the Emperor his heir, and then executed to expedite 
the succession. There was a hideous jocularity in some 
of these imperial proceedings, which, however, was no 
laughing-matter at the time. When a senator was very 
wealthy, it was no unusual thing for Tiberius and his 
successors to create themselves the rich man's nearest 
relations by a decree of the Senate. The person so 
honoured by this graft upon his family tree seldom sur- 
vived the operation many days. The emperor took 
possession of the property as heir-at-law and next of 
kin ; and mourned for his uncle or brother — as the case 
might be — with the most edifying decorum. 

But besides giving the general likeness of a period, it 
is necessary to individualize it still further by introducing, 
in the background of the picture, some incident by which 
it is peculiarly known, as we find Nelson generally repre- 
sented with Trafalgar going on at the horizon, and Wel- 
lington sitting thoughtful on horseback in the foreground 
of the fire of Waterloo. Now, there cannot be a more 

3* 



30 FIRST CENTURY. 

distinguishing mark than a certain great military achieve- 
ment which happened in the year 70 of this century, and 
is hrought home to us, not only as a great historical event 
in itself, but as the commencement of a new era in human 
affairs, and the completion of a long line of threats and 
prophecies. This was the capture and destruction of 
Jerusalem. The accounts given us of this siege tran- 
scend in horror all other records of human sorrow. It 
was at the great annual feast of the Passover, when Jews 
from all parts of the world flocked to the capital of their 
nation to worship in the Temple, which to them was the 
earthly dwelling-place of Jehovah. The time was come, 
and they did not know it, when God was to be wor- 
shipped in spirit and in truth. More than a million 
strangers were resident within the walls. There was no 
room in house or hall for so vast a multitude; so they 
bivouacked in the streets, and lay thick as leaves in the 
courts of the holy place. Suddenly the Eoman trumpets 
blew. The Jews became inspired with fanatical hatred 
of the enemy, and insane confidence that some miracle 
would be wrought for their deliverence. They delibe- 
rated, -and chose for their leaders the wildest and most 
enthusiastic of the crowd. They refused the offers of 
mercy and reconciliation made to them by Titus. They 
sent back insulting messages to the Eoman general, and 
stood expectant on the walls to see the idolatrous legions 
smitten by lightning or swallowed up by an earthquake. 
But Titus advanced his forces and hemmed in the count- 
less multitude of men, and women, and children — few 
able to resist, but all requiring to be fed. Famine and 
pestilence came on; but still the mad fanatics of the 
Temple determined to persevere. They occasionally 
opened a gate and rushed out with the cry of " The 
sword of the Lord and of Gideon !" and were slaughtered 
by the unpitying hatred of the Eoman soldiers. Their 



THE SIEGE. 31 

cruelty to their prisoners, when they succeeded in carry- 
ing off a few of their enemies, was great; but the pa- 
tience of Titus at last gave way, and he soon bettered the 
instruction they gave him in pitilessness and blood. He 
drew a line of circumvallation closer round the city, and 
intercepted every supply ; when deserters came over, he 
crucified them all round the trenches ; when the worn- 
out people came forth, imploring to be suffered to pass 
through his ranks, he drove them back, that they might 
increase the scarcity by their lives, or the pestilence by 
adding to the heaps of unburied dead. Dissensions were 
raging all this time among the defenders themselves. 
They fought in the streets, in the houses, and heaped 
the floor and outcourts of the Temple with thousands of 
the slain. There was no help either from heaven or 
earth; eleven hundred thousand people had died of 
plague and the sword; and the rest were doomed to 
perish by more lingering torments. Nearest relations — 
sisters, brothers, fathers, wives — all forgot the ties of 
natural affection under this great necessity, and fought 
for a handful of meal, or the possession of some reptile's 
body if they were lucky enough to trace it to its hiding- 
place; and at last — the crown of all horrors — the 
daughter of Eleazer killed her own child and converted 
it into food. The measure of man's wrong and Heaven's 
vengeance was now full. The daily sacrifice ceased to be 
offered ; voices were audible to the popular ear uttering 
in the Holy of Holies, " Let us go hence." The Eomans 
rushed on — climbed over the neglected walls — forced 
their way into the upper Temple, and the gore flowed 
in streams so rapid and so deep that it seemed like a 
purple river! Large conduits had been made for the 
rapid conveyance away of the blood of bulls and goats 
offered in sacrifice; they all became choked now with 
the blood of the slaughtered people. At last the city 



32 FIRST CENTURY. 

was taken ; the inhabitants were either dead or dying. 
Many were crushed as they lay expiring in the great 
tramplings of the triumphant Eomans ; many were re- 
covered by food and shelter, and sold into slavery. The 
Temple and walls were levelled with the ground, and 
not one stone was left upon another. The plough passed 
over where palace and tower had been, and the Jewish 
dispensation was brought to a close. 

History in ancient days was as exclusive as the court 
newsman in ours, and never published the movements 
of anybody below a senator or a consul. All the Browns 
and Smiths were left out of consideration ; and yet to 
us who live in the days when those families — with the 
Joneses and Eobinsons — form the great majority both 
in number and influence, it would be very interesting to 
have any certain intelligence of their predecessors during 
the first furies of the Empire. We have but faint de- 
scriptions even of the aristocracy, but what we hear of 
them shows, more clearly than any thing else, the fright- 
ful effect on morals and manliness of so uncontrolled a 
power as was vested in the Caesars, and teaches us that 
the worst of despotisms is that which is established by 
the unholy union of the dregs of the population and 
the ruling power, against the peace and happiness and 
security of the middle class. You see how this combi- 
nation of tyrant and mob succeeded in crushing all the 
layers of society which lay between them, till there were 
left only two agencies in all the world — the Emperor on 
his throne, and the millions fed by his bounty. The 
hereditary nobility — the safest bulwark of a people and 
least dangerous support of a throne — were extirpated 
before the end of the century, and impartiality makes 
us confess that they fell by their own fault. As if the 
restraints of shame had been thrown off with the Jast 
hope of liberty, the whole population broke forth into 



STATE OF ROME. 33 

the most incredible licentiousness. If the luxury of 
Lucullus had offended the common sense of propriety 
in the later days of the republic, there were numbers 
now who looked back upon his feasts as paltry enter- 
tainments, and on the wealth of Croesus as poverty. 
The last of the Pompeys, in the time of Caligula, had 
estates so vast, that navigable rivers larger than the 
Thames performed the whole of their course from their 
fountain-head to the sea without leaving his domain. 
There were spendthrifts in the time of Tiberius who 
lavished thousands of pounds upon a supper. The pil- 
lage of the world had fallen into the hands of a few 
favoured families, and their example had introduced a 
prodigality and ostentation unheard of before. No one 
who regarded appearances travelled anywhere without 
a troop of Numidian horsemen, and outriders to clear 
the way. He was followed by a train of mules and 
sumpter-horses loaded with his vases of crystal — his 
richly-carved cups and dishes of silver and gold. But 
this profusion had its natural result in debt and degra- 
dation. The patricians who had been rivals of the 
imperial splendour became dependants on the imperial 
gifts; and the grandson of the conqueror of a kingdom, 
or the proconsul of the half of Asia, sold his ancestral 
palace, lived for a while on the contemptuous bounty of 
his master, and sank in the next generation into the 
nameless mass. Others, more skilful, preserved or 
improved their fortunes while they rioted in expense. 
By threats or promises, they prevailed on the less 
powerful to constitute them their heirs; they traded 
on the strength, or talents, or the beauty of their 
slaves, and lent money at such usurious interest that 
the borrower tried in vain to escape the shackles of 
the law, and ended by becoming the bondsman of 
c 



34 FIRST CENTURY, 

the kind-hearted gentleman who had induced him to 
accept the loan. 

If these were the habits of the rich, how were the 
poor treated? The free and penniless citizens of the 
capital were degraded and gratified at the same time. 
The wealthy vied with each other in buying the favour 
of the mob by shows and other entertainments, by gifts 
of money and donations of food. But when these arts 
failed, and popularity could no longer be obtained by 
merely defraying the expense of a combat of gladiators, 
the descendants of the old patricians — of the men who 
had bought the land on which the Gauls were en- 
camped outside the gates of Eome — went down into the 
arena themselves and fought for the public entertain- 
ment. Laws indeed were passed even in the reign of 
Tiberius, and renewed at intervals after that time, 
against this shameful degradation, and the stage was 
interdicted to all who were not previously declared in- 
famous by sentence of a court. But all was in vain. 
Ladies of the highest rank, and the loftiest-born of the 
nobility, actually petitioned for a decree of defamation, 
that they might give themselves up undisturbed to their 
favourite amusement. This perhaps added a zest to 
their enjoyment, and rapturous applauses must have 
hailed the entrance of the beautiful grandchild of 
Anthony or Agrippa, in the character and drapery of a 
warlike amazon — the louder the applause and greater 
the admiration. Yet in order to gratify them with such 
a sight, she had descended to the level of the convict, 
and received the brand of qualifying disgrace from a 
legal tribunal. But the faint barrier of this useless pro- 
hibition was thrown down by the policy and example 
of Domitian. The emperor himself appeared in the 
arena, and all restraint was at an end. Bather, thcro 
was a fury of emulation to copy so great a model, and 



TREATMENT OF SLAVES. 35 

"Eome's proud dames, whose garments swept the 
ground," forgot more than ever their rank and sex, ar>d 
were proud, like their lovers and brothers, not merely 
to mount the stage in the lascivious costume of nymph 
or dryad, but to descend into the blood-stained lists of 
the Coliseum and murder each other with sword and 
spear. There is something strangely horrible in this 
transaction, when we read that it occurred for the first 
time in celebration of the games of Flora — the goddess 
of flowers and gardens, who, in old times, was wor- 
shipped under the blossomed apple-trees in the little 
orchards surrounding each cottage within the walls, 
and was propitiated with children's games and chaplets 
hung upon the boughs. But now the loveliest of the 
noble daughters of the city lay dead upon the trampled 
sand. "What was the effect upon the populace of these 
extraordinary shows ? 

Always stern and cruel, the Eoman was now never 
satisfied unless with the spectacle of death. Sometimes 
in the midst of a play or pantomime the fierce lust of 
blood would seize him, and he would cry out for a 
combat of gladiators or nobles, who instantly obeyed; 
and after the fight was over, and the corpses removed, 
the play would go on as if nothing had occurred. The 
banners of the empire still continued to bear the initial 
letters of the great words — the Senate and people of 
Rome. We have now, in this rapid survey, seen what 
both those great names have come to — the Senate crawl- 
ing at the feet of the emperor, and the people living on 
charity and shows. The slaves fared worst of all, for 
they were despised by rich and poor. The sated volup- 
tuary whose property they were sometimes found an 
excitement to his jaded spirits by having them tortured 
in his sight. They were allowed to die of starvation 
when they grew old, unless they were turned to use, as 



86 FIRST CENTURY. 

was done by one of their possessors, Vidius Pollio, who 
cast the fattest of his domestics into his fish-pond to feed 
his. lampreys. The only other classes were the actors 
and musicians, the dwarfs and the philosophers. They 
contributed by their wit, or their uncouth shape, or their 
oracular sentences, to the amusement of their employers, 
and were safe. They were licensed characters, and could 
say what they chose, protected by the long-drawn coun- 
tenance of the stoic, or the comic grimaces of the buffoon. 
So early as the time of Nero, the people he tyrannized 
and flattered were not less ruthless than himself. In 
his cruelty — in his vanity — in his frivolity, and his 
entire devotion to the gratification .of his passions — he 
was a true representative of the men over whom he 
ruled. Emperor and subject had even then become 
fitted for each other, and flowers, we are credibly told 
by the historians, were hung for many years upon his 
tomb. 

Humanity itself seemed to be sunk beyond the possi- 
bility of restoration ; but we see now how necessary it 
was that our nature should reach its lowest point of 
depression to give full force to the great reaction which 
Christianity introduced. Men were slavishly bending 
at the footstool of a despot, trembling for life, bowed 
down by fear and misery, when suddenly it was re- 
ported that a great teacher had appeared for a while 
upon earth, and declared that all men were equal in the 
sight of God, for that God was the Father of all. The 
slave heard this in the intervals of his torture — the cap- 
tive in his dungeon — the widow and the orphan. To 
the poor the gospel, or good news, was preached. It 
was this which made the trembling courtiers of the 
worst of the emperors slip out noiselessly from the 
palace, and hear from Paul of Tarsus or his disciples 
the new prospect that was opening on mankind. It 



TREATMENT OF SLAVES. 37 

spread quickly among those oppressed and hopeless 
multitudes. The subjection of the Roman empire — its 
misery and degradation — were only a means to an end. 
The harsher the laws of the tyrant, the more gracious 
seemed the words of Christ. The two masters were 
plainly set before them, which to choose. And who 
could hesitate ? One said, " Tremble ! suffer ! die !" 
The other said, " Come unto me, all ye that are weary 
and heavy laden, and I will give you rest !" 



SECOND CENTURY. 



A.D. 



IBmperors. 



Trajan — [continued.) Third Persecution of the Chris- 
tians. 
117. Adrian. Fourth Persecution of the Christians. 
138. Antoninus Pius. 
161. Marcus Aurelius. 
180. Commodus. 

193. Pertinax — Didius, and Niger — Defeated by 
193. Septimius Severus. 

authors, 

Pliny the Younger, Plutarch, Suetonius, Juvenal, Arrian, 
iELiAN, Ptolemy, (Geographer,) Appian, Eptctetus, Pausanias, 
Galen, (Physician,) Athenjsus, Tertullian, Justin Martyr, 
Tatian, Iren^eus, Athenagoras, Theophilus or Antioch, Cle- 
ment of Alexandria, Marcion, (Heretic.) 



THE SECOND CENTTJEY. 

THE GOOD EMPERORS. 

In looking at the second century, we see a total differ- 
ence in the expression, though the main features con- 
tinue unchanged. There is still the central power at 
Eome, the same dependence everywhere else; but the 
central power is beneficent and wise. As if tired of the 
hereditary rule of succession which had ended in such a 
monster as Domitian, the world took refuge in a new 
system of appointing its chiefs, and perhaps thought it 
a recommendation of each successive emperor that he 
had no relationship to the last. We shall accordingly 
find that, after this period, the hereditary principle is 
excluded. It was remarked that, of the twelve first 
Caesars, only two had died a natural death — for even in 
the case of Augustus the arts of the poisoner were sus- 
pected — and those two were Yespasian and Titus, men 
who had no claim to such an elevation in right of lofty 
birth. Birth, indeed, had ceased to be a recommendation. 
All the great names of the Eepublic had been carefully 
rooted out. Few people were inclined to boast of their 
ancestry when the proof of their pedigree acted as a sen- 
tence of death ; for there was no surer passport to destruc- 
tion in the times of the early emperors than a connection 
with the Julian line, or descent from a historic family. 
No one, therefore, took the trouble to inquire into the 
genealogy of Nerva, the old and generous man 
who succeeded the monster Domitian. His nomi- 
nation to the empire elevated him at once out of the 

4* 41 



42 



SECOND CENTURY. 



sphere of these inquiries, for already the same supersti- 
tious reverence surrounded the name of Augustus 
which spreads its inviolable sanctity on the throne of 
Eastern monarch s. Whoever sits upon that, by what- 
ever title, or however acquired, is the legitimate and 
unquestioned king. No rival, therefore, started up to 
contest the position either of Nerva himself, or of the 
stranger he nominated to succeed him. Men bent in 
humble acquiescence when they knew, in the third year 
„ nai of this century, that their master was named 

A.D. 102. J 7 

Trajan, — that he was a Spaniard by birth, and 
the best general of Rome. For eighty years after that 
date the empire had rest. Life and property were com- 
paratively secure, and society flowed on peaceably in 
deep and well-ascertained channels. A man might have 
been born at the end of the reign of Domitian, and die 
in extreme old age under the sway of the last of the 
Antonines, and never have known of insecurity or op- 
pression — 

" Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing 
Could touch him farther !" 

No wonder those agreeable years were considered by 
the fond gratitude of the time, and the unavailing re- 
grets of succeeding generations, the golden age of man. 
Nerva, Trajan, Adrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius 
Antoninus — these are still great names, and are every- 
where recognised as the most wonderful succession of 
sovereigns the world has ever seen. They are still called 
the " G-ood Emperors," the " Wise Bulers." 

It is easy, indeed, to be good in comparison with Nero, 
and wise in comparison with Claudius; but the effect 
of the example of those infamous tyrants made it 
doubly difficult to be either good or wise. The world 
had become so accustomed to oppression, that it seemed 
at first surprised at the change that had taken place. 



HAPPINESS OF THE WORLD. 43 

The emperors had to create a knowledge of justice be- 
fore their just acts could be appreciated. The same 
opposition other men have experienced in introducing 
bad and cruel measures was roused by their introduc- 
tion of wise and salutary laws. What ! no more sum- 
mary executions, nor forfeitures of fortunes, nor banish- 
ments to the Danube ? All men equal before the dread 
tribunal of the imperial judge ? The world was surely 
coming to an end, if the emperor did not now and then 
poison a senator, or stab his brother, or throw half a 
dozen courtiers to the beasts ! It is likely enough that 
some of the younger Romans at first lamented those 
days of unlimited license and perpetual excitement; 
but in the course of time those wilder spirits must have 
died out, and the world gladly acquiesced in an exist- 
ence of dull security and uninteresting peace. By the 
end of the reign of Trajan the records of the miseries 
of the last century must have been studied as curiosities 
— as historical students now look back on the extrava- 
gances and horrors of the French Revolution. Fortu- 
nately, men could not look forward to the times, more piti- 
able still, when their descendants should fall into greater 
sorrows than had been inflicted on mankind by the 
worst of the Caesars, and they enjoyed their present 
immunity from suffering without any misgivings about 
the future. But a government which does every thing 
for a people renders it unable to do any thing for itself. 
The subject stood quietly by while the emperor filled all 
the offices of the State — guarded him, fed him, clothed 
him, treated him like a child, and reduced him at last 
to 'childlike dependence. An unjust proconsul, instead 
of being supported and encouraged in his exactions, was 
dismissed from his employment and forced to refund 
his ill-got gains, — the population, relieved from their 
oppressor, saw in his punishment the hand of an aveng- 



44 SECOND CENTURY. 

ing Providence. The wakeful eye of the governor in 
Rome saw the hostile preparations of a tribe of bar- 
barians beyond the Danube; and the legions, crossing 
the river, dispersed and subdued them before they had 
time to devastate the Eoman fields. The peaceful 
colonist saw, in the suddenness of his deliverance, the 
foresight and benevolence of a divinity. No words were 
powerful enough to convey the sentiments of admiration 
awakened, by such vigour and goodness, in the breast 
of a luxurious and effeminate people; and accordingly, 
if we look a little closely into the personal attributes of 
the five good emperors, we shall see that some part of 
their glory is due to the exaggerations of love and grati- 
tude. 

Nerva reigned but sixteen months, and had no time 
to do more than display his kindness of disposition, and 
to name his successor. This was Trajan, a man who 
was not even a Roman by birth, but who was thought 
by his patron to have retained, in the distant province 
of Spain where he was born, the virtues which had dis- 
appeared in the centre and capital of the empire. The 
deficiency of Nerva's character had been its softness 
and want of force. The stern vigilance of Trajan made 
ample amends. Tie was the best-known soldier of his 
time, and revived once more the terror of the Eoman 
arms. He conquered wherever he appeared; but his 
warlike impetuosity led him too far. He trod in the 
footsteps of Alexander the Great, and advanced farther 
eastward than any of the Eoman armies had previously 
done. But his victories were fruitless : he attached no 
new country permanently to the empire, and derives*all 
his glory now from the excellence of his internal admi- 
nistration. He began his government by declaring him- 
self as subordinate to the laws as the meanest of the 
people. His wife, Pompcia Plotina, was worthy of such 



TRAJAN. 45 

a husband, and said, on mounting the steps of the 
palace, that she should descend them unaltered from 
what she was. The emperor visited his friends on 
terms of equality, and had the greatness of mind, gene- 
rally deficient in absolute princes, to bestow his confi- 
dence on those who deserved it. Somebody, a member 
perhaps of the old police who had made such fortunes 
in the time of Domitian by alarming the tyrant with 
stories of plots and assassinations, told Trajan one day 
to beware of his minister, who intended to murder him 
on the first opportunity. " Come again, and tell me 
all particulars to-morrow," said the emperor. In the 
mean time he went unbidden and supped with the 
accused. He was shaved by his barber — was attended 
for a mock illness by his surgeon — bathed in his bath — 
and ate his meat and drank his wine. On the following 
day the informer came. "Ah!" said Trajan, interrupt- 
ing him in his accusation of Surenus, "if Surenus had 
wished to kill me, he would have done it last night." 
The emperor died when returning from a distant expe- 
„,. dition in the East, and Pompeia declared that he 

A.D. 117. 1 L 

had long designated Adrian as his successor. This 
evidence was believed, and Adrian, also a Spaniard by 
birth, and eminent as a military commander, began his 
reign. Trajan had been a general — a conqueror, and 
had extended for a time the boundaries of the Roman 
power. But Adrian believed the empire was large 
enough already. He withdrew the eagles from the half- 
subdued provinces, and contented himself with the 
natural limits which it was easy to defend. But within 
those limits his activity was unexampled. He journeyed 
from end to end of his immense domain, and for seven- 
teen years never rested in one spot. News did not 
travel fast in those days — but the emperor did. Long 
before the inhabitants of Syria and Egypt heard that 



46 SECOND CENTURY. 

he had left Rome on an expedition to Britain, he had 
rushed through Gaul, erossed the Channel, inquired into 
the proceedings of the government officers at York, 
given orders for a wall to keep out the Caledonians, (an 
attempt which has proved utterly vain at all periods of 
English history, down to the present day,) and suddenly 
made his appearance among the bewildered dwellers in 
Ephesus or Carthage, to call tax-gatherers to order and 
to inspect the discipline of his troops. The master's 
eye was everywhere, for nobody knew on what point it 
was fixed. And such a master no kingdom has been 
able to boast of since. His talents were universal. He 
read every thing and forgot nothing. He was a musi- 
cian, a poet, a philosopher. He studied medicine and 
mineralogy, and plead causes like Cicero, and sang 
like a singer at the opera. Perhaps it is difficult to 
judge impartially of the qualities of a Eoman emperor. 
One day he found fault on a point of grammar with a 
learned man of the name of Favorinus.* Favorinus 
could have defended himself and justified his language, 
but continued silent. His friends said to him, "Why 
didn't you answer the emperor's objections?" "Do you 
think," said the sensible grammarian, "I am going to 
enter into disputes with a man who commands thirty 
legions ?" Eut the greatness of Adrian's character is, 
that he did command those thirty legions. He was 
severe and just; and Eoman discipline was never more 
exact. The result of this was shown on the grand scale 
only once during this reign, and that was in the case of 
the revolted Jews. "We have seen the state to which 
their Temple at Jerusalem was reduced by Titus. Fifty 
years had now passed, and the passionate love of the 
people for their native land had congregated them once 
more within their renovated walls, and raised up another 
temple on the site of the old. They still expected the 



ADRIAN. 47 

Messiah, for the Messiah to them represented vengeance 
upon the Komans and triumph over the world. An im- 
postor of the name of Barcho-chebas led three hundred 
thousand of them into the field. They were mad with 
national hatred, and inspired with fanatical hope. It 
took three years of desperate effort to quell this sedi- 
tion ; and then Adrian had his revenge. The country 
was laid waste. Fifty towns and a thousand villages 
were sacked and burned. The population, once more 
nearly exhausted by war and famine, furnished slaves, 
which were sold all over the East. Jerusalem itself felt 
the conqueror's hatred most. Its name was blotted out 
— it was called iElia Capitolina; and, with ferocious 
mockery, over the gate of the new capital of Judea was 
affixed the statue of the unclean beast, the abomination 
of the Israelite. Eut nothing could keep the Jews from 
visiting the land of so many promises and so much glory. 
Whenever they had it in their power, they crept back 
from all quarters, if it were only to weep and die amid 
the ruins of their former power. 

Trajan and Adrian had now made the world accus- 
tomed to justice in its rulers; and as far as regards their 
public conduct, this character is not to be denied. Yet 
in their private relations they were not so faultless. 
Trajan the great and good was a drunkard. To such a 
pitch did he carry this vice, that he gave orders that 
after a certain hour of the day none of his commands 
were to be obeyed. Adrian was worse : he was regard- 
less of life; he put men to death for very small offences. 
An architect was asked how he liked a certain series of 
statues designed by the emperor and ranged in a sitting 
attitude round a temple which he had built. The archi- 
tect was a humourist, not a courtier. " If the god- 
desses," he said, " take it into their heads to rise, they 
will never be able to get out at the door." A poor 



48 SECOND CENTURY. 

criticism, and not a good jnece of wit, but not bad 
enough to justify his being beheaded; yet the answer 
cost the poor man his life. As Adrian grew older, he 
grew more reckless of the pain he gave. He had a 
brother-in-laAV ninety years of age, and there was a 
grandson of the old man aged eighteen. He had them 
both executed on proof or suspicion of a conspiracy. 
The popular feeling was revolted by the sight of the 
mingled blood of two sufferers so nearly related, at the 
opposite extremities of life. The old man, just before 
he died, protested his innocence, and uttered a revenge- 
ful prayer that Adrian might wish to die and find death 
impossible ! This imprecation was fulfilled. The em- 
peror was tortured with disease, and longed for deliver- 
ance in vain. He called round him his physicians, and 
priests, and sorcerers, but they could give him no relief. 
He begged his slaves to kill him, and stabbed himself 
with a dagger; but in spite of all he could not die. 
Lingering on, and with no cessation of his pain, he 
must have had sad thoughts of the past, and no pleasant 
anticipations of the future, if, as we learn from the verses 
attributed to him, he believed in a future state. His lines 
still remain, but are indebted to Pope, who paraphrased 
them, for their Christian spirit and lofty aspiration: — 

"Vital spark of heavenly flame ! 
Quit, oh, quit this mortal frame ! 
Trembling, hoping, lingering, flying, 
Oh, the pain, the bliss of dying ! 
Cease, fond nature, cease thy strife, 
And let me languish into life ! 

" Hark ! they whisper ! angels say, 
Sister spirit, come away ! 
What is this absorbs me quite, 
Steals my senses, shuts my sight, 
Drowns my spirits, draws my breath? 
Tell me, my soul, can this be death ? 



ANTONINUS. 



49 



" The world recedes ; it disappears ! 
Heaven opens on my eyes ! my ears 

With sounds seraphic ring: 
Lend, lend your wings ! I mount ! I fly ! 
Grave ! where is thy victory ? 
Death ! where is thy sting ?" 

His wish was at last achieved. He died aged sixty- 
two, having reigned twenty-one years. In travelling 
and building his whole time was spent. Temples, theatres, 
bridges — wherever he went, these evidences of his wisdom 
or magnificence remained. He persecuted the Christians, 
but found persecution a useless proceeding against a sect 
who gloried in martyrdom, and whose martyrdoms were 
only followed by new conversions. He tried what an 
opposite course of conduct would do, and is said to have 
intended to erect a temple to Jesus Christ. " Take care 
what you do," said one of his counsellors : " if you 
permit an altar to the God of the Christians, those of 
the other gods will be deserted." 

But now came to supreme authority the good and 
„■ wise Antoninus Pius, who was as blameless in 

A.D. 138. , . ' 

his private conduct as in his public acts. His 
fame extended farther than the Eoman arms had ever 
reached. Distant kings, in lands of which the names 
were scarcely known in the Forum, took him as arbiter 
of their differences. The decision of the great man in 
Rome gave peace on the banks of the Indus. The bar- 
barians themselves on the outskirts of his dominions 
were restrained by respect for a character so pure and 
power so wisely used. An occasional revolt in Britain 
was quelled by his lieutenants — an occasional conspiracy 
against his authority was caused by the discontent 
which turbulent spirits feel when restrained by law. 
The conspiracies were repressed, and on one occasion 
two of the ringleaders were put to death. The Senate 
was for making further inquiry into the plot. " Let us 
D 5 



50 SECOND CENTURY. 

stop here," said the emperor. " I do not wish to find 
out how many people I have displeased." Some stories 
are told of him, which show how little he affected the 
state of a despotic ruler. A pedantic philosopher at 
Smyrna, of the name of Polemo, returned from a 
journey at a late hour, and found the proconsul of 
Eome lodged in his house. This proconsul was Anto- 
nine, who at that time had been appointed to the office 
Dy Adrian. Instead of being honoured by such a guest, 
the philosopher stormed and raged, and made so much 
noise, that in the middle of the night the sleepless pro- 
consul left the house and found quarters elsewhere. 
When years passed on, and Antonine was on the throne, 
Polemo had the audacity to present himself as an old 
acquaintance. "Ha! I remember him," said the em- 
peror: "let him have a room in the palace, but don't let 
him leave it night or day." The imprisonment was not 
long, for we find the same Polemo hero of another anec- 
dote during this visit to Pome. He hissed a performer in 
the theatre, and stamped and screeched, and made such 
a disturbance that the unfortunate actor had to leave 
the stage. He complained of Polemo to the emperor. 
"Polemo!" exclaimed Antonine; "he forced you off the 
stage in the middle of the day, but he drove me from his 
house in the middle of the night, and yet I never ap- 
pealed." It would be pleasant if we could learn that 
Polemo did not get off so easily. But the twenty-two 
years of this reign of mildness and probity were brought 
to a close, and Marcus Aurclius succeeded in 161. 

Marcus Aurelius did no dishonour to the discernment 
,., of his friend and adoptive father Antoninus Pius. 

A.D. 161. L 

Studying philosophy and practising self-command, 
he emulated and surpassed the virtues of the self-denying 
leaders of his sect, and only broke through the rule he 
imposed on himself of clemency and mildness, when he 



MARCUS AURELIUS. 51 

found philosophy in danger of being counted a vain de- 
ceit, and the active duties of human brotherhood pre- 
ferred to the theoretic rhapsodies on the same subject 
with which his works were filled. Times began to 
change. Men were dissatisfied with the unsubstantial 
dream of Platonist and Stoic. There were symptoms 
of an approaching alteration in human affairs, which 
perplexed the thoughtful and gave promise of impunity 
to the bad. Perhaps a man who, clothed in the impe- 
rial purple, bestowed so much study on the intellectual 
niceties of the Sophists, and endeavoured to keep his 
mind in a fit state for abstract speculation by scourging 
and starving his body, was not so fitted for the approach- 
ing crisis as a rougher and less contemplative nature 
would have been. Britain was in commotion, there were 
tumults on the Ehine, and in Armenia the Parthians 
cut the Eoman legions to pieces. And scarcely were 
those troubles settled and punished, when a worse 
calamity befell the Eoman empire. Its inviolability be- 
came a boast of the past. The fearful passions for con- 
quest and rapine of the border-barbarians were roused. 
Barbaric cohorts encamped on the fields of Italy, and 
the hosts of wild men from the forests of the North pil- 
laged the heaped-up treasures of the garden of the world. 
The emperor flew to the scene of danger, but the fatal 
word had been said. Italy was accessible from the Alps 
and from the sea; and, though a bloody defeat at Aquileia 
flung back the invaders, disordered and dispirited, over 
the mountains they had descended with such hopes, the 
struggle was but begun. The barbarians felt their 
power, and the old institutions of Eome were insufli- 
cient to resist future attacks. But to the aid of the old 
Eoman institutions a new institution came, an institu- 
tion which was destined to repel the barbarians by over- 
coming barbarism itself, and save the dignity of Eome 



52 SECOND CENTURY. 

by giving it the protection of the Cross. But at present 
— that is, during the reign of the philosophic Marcus 
Aurelius— a persecution raged against the Christians 
which seemed to render hopeless all chance of their 
success. The mild laws of Trajan and Adrian, and the 
favourable decrees of Antoninus Pius, were set aside by 
the contemptuous enmity of this explorer of the myste- 
rious heights of virtue, which occasionally carried him 
out of sight of the lower but more important duties of 
life. An unsocial tribe the Christians were, who rigor- 
ously shut their eyes to the beauties of abstract perfec- 
tion, and preferred the plain orders of the gospel to the 
most ambitious periods of the emperor. But the perse- 
cution of a sect so small and so obscure as the Chris- 
tian was at that time, is scarcely perceptible as a diminu- 
tion of the sum of human happiness secured to the 
world by the gentleness and equity which regulated all 
his actions. Here is an example of the way in which he 
treated rebels against his authority. An insurrection 
broke out in Syria and the East, headed by a pretended 
descendant of the patriot Cassius, who had conspired 
against Julius Caesar. The emperor hurried to meet 
him — some say to resign the empire into his hands, to 
prevent the effusion of blood ; but the usurper died in 
an obscure commotion, and nothing was left but to take 
vengeance on his adherents. This is the letter the con- 
queror wrote to the Senate : — " I beseech you, conscript 
Fathers ! not to punish the guilty with too much rigour. 
Let no Senator be put to death. Let the banished re- 
turn to their country. I wish I could give back their 
lives to those who have died in this quarrel. Eevenge 
is unworthy of an emperor. You will pardon, therefore, 
the children of Cassius, his son-in-law, and his wife. 
Pardon, did I say ? Ah ! what crime have they com- 
mitted? Let them live in safety, let them retain all 



DEATH OF MARCUS AURELIUS. & 3 

that Cassius possessed. Let them live in whatever 
j)lace they choose, to be a monument of your clemency 
and mine/' 

In such hands as these the fortune of mankind was 
safe. A pity that the father's feelings got the better of 
his judgment in the choice of his successor. It is the 
one blot on his otherwise perfect disinterestedness. In 
dying, with such a monster as Commodus ready to leap 
into his seat, he must have felt how inexpressibly valu- 
able his life would be to the Eoman people. He perhaps 
saw the danger to which he exposed the world ; for he 
committed his son to the care of his wisest counsellors, 
and begged him to continue the same course of govern- 
ment he had pursued. Perhaps he was tired of life, per- 
haps he sought refuge in his self-denying philosophy from 
the prospect he saw before him of a state of perpetual 
struggle and eventual overthrow. When the Tribune 
came for the last time to ask the watchword of the day, 
" Go to the rising sun," he said ; " for me, I am just 
going to set." 

And here the history of the Second Century should 
close. It is painful to go back again to the hideous 
scenes of anarchy and crime from which we have been 
delivered so long. What must the sage counsellors, the 
chosen companions and equals in age of the Antonines, 
have thought when all at once the face of affairs, which 
they must have believed eternal, was changed ? — when 
the noblest and wisest in the land were again thrown 
heedlessly into the arena without trial? — when spies 
watched every meal, and the ferocious murderer on the 
throne seemed to gloat over the struggles of his victims ? 
Yet, if they had reflected on the inevitable course of 
events, they must have seen that a government de- 
pending on the character of one man could never be 
relied on. Where, indeed, could any element of security 



£> 4 SECOND CENTURY. 

be found ? The very ground- work of society was over- 
thrown. There was no independent body erect amid 
the general prostration at the footstool of the emperor. 
Local self-government had ceased except in name. All 
the towns which hitherto had been subordinate to Eome, 
but endowed at the same time with privileges which 
were worth defending, had been absorbed into the great 
whirlpool of imperial centralization, and were admitted 
to the rights of Roman citizenship, — now of little value, 
since it embraced every quarter of the empire. Jupiter 
and Juno, and the herd of effete gods and goddesses, 
if they had ever held any practical influence over the 
minds of men, had long sunk into contempt, except in 
so far as their rich establishments were defended by 
persons interested in their maintenance, and the proces- 
sions and gaudy display of a foul and meretricious wor- 
ship were pleasing to the depraved taste of the mob. 
But the religious principle, as a motive of action, or as 
a point of combination, was at an end. Augurs were 
still appointed, and laughed at the uselessness of their 
office; oracles were still uttered, and ridiculed as the 
offspring of ignorance and imposture ; conflicting deities 
fought for pre-eminence, or compromised their differences 
by an amalgamation of their altars, and perhaps a divi- 
sion of their estates. It was against this state of society 
the early Fathers directed their warnings and denuncia- 
tions. The world did certainly lie in darkness, and it 
was indispensable to warn the followers of Christ not 
to be conformed to the fashion of that fleeting time. 
Some, to escape the contagion of this miserable condi- 
tion, when men were without hope, and without even 
the wretched consolation which a belief in a false god 
would have given them, fled to the wilds and caves. 
Hermits escaped equally the perils of sin and the hos- 
tility of the heathen. Believers were exhorted to flee 



FORCES OF THE EMPIRE. 55 

from contamination, and some took the words in their 
literal meaning. But not all. Many remained, and 
fought the good fight in the front of the battle, as 
became the soldiers of the cross. In the midst of the 
anarchy and degradation which characterized the last 
years of the century, a society was surely and steadily 
advancing towards its full development, bound by rules 
in the midst of the helplessness of external law, and 
combined by strong faith, in a world of utter unbelief — an 
empire within an empire — soon to be the only specimen 
left either of government or mutual obligation, and 
finally to absorb into its fresh and still-spreading organ- 
ization the withered and impotent authority which had 
at first seen in it its enemy and destroyer, and found 
it at last its refuge and support. Yet at this very time 
the empire had never appeared so strong. By a stroke 
of policy, which the event proved to be injudicious, 
Marcus Aurelius, in the hope of diminishing the number 
of his enemies, had converted many thousands of the 
barbarians into his subjects. They had settlements 
assigned them within the charmed ring. What they 
had not been able to obtain by the sword was now 
assured to them by treaty. But the unity of the Roman 
empire by this means was destroyed. Men were ad- 
mitted within the citadel who had no reverence im- 
planted in them from their earliest years for the majesty 
of the Roman name. They saw the riches contained in 
the stronghold, and were only anxious to open the gates 
to their countrymen who were still outside the walls. 

But before we enter on the downward course, and 
since we are now arrived at the period of the greatest 
apparent force and extent of the Eoman empire, let us 
see what it consisted of, and what was the real amount 
of its power. 

Viewed in comparison with some of the monarchies 



56 SECOND CENTURY. 

of the present day, neither its extent of territory, nor 
amount of population, nor number of soldiers, is very 
surprising. The Queen of England reigns over more 
subjects, and commands far mightier fleets and armies, 
than any of the Roman emperors. The empire of 
Eussia is more extensive, and yet the historians of a few 
generations ago are lost in admiration of the power of 
Rome. The whole military force of the empire amounted 
to four hundred and fifty thousand men. The total 
number of vessels did not exceed a thousand. But see 
what were the advantages Rome possessed in the com- 
pactness of its territory and the unity of its government. 
The great Mediterranean Sea, peopled and cultivated on 
both its shores, was but a peaceful lake, on which the 
Roman galley had no enemy to fear, and the merchant- 
ship dreaded nothing but the wiuds and waves. There 
were no fortresses to be garrisoned on what are now the 
boundaries of jealous or hostile kingdoms. If the great 
circuit of the Roman State could be protected from bar- 
barian inroads, the internal defence of all that vast en- 
closure could be left to the civil power. If the Black 
Sea and the Sea of Azoff could be kept clear of piratical 
adventurers, the broad highway of the Mediterranean 
was safe. A squadron near Gibraltar, a squadron at the 
Dardanelles, and the tribes which might possibly venture 
in from the ocean — the tribes which, slipping down from 
the Don or the Dnieper, might thread their way through 
the Hellespont and emerge into the Egean — were caught 
at their first appearance ; and when the wisdom of the 
Romans had guarded the mouths of the Danube from 
the descent, in canoe or coracle, of the wild settlers on 
its upper banks, the peace and commerce of the whole 
empire were secured. With modern Europe the case is 
very different. There are boundaries to be guarded 
which occupy more soldiers than the territories are 



MODERN FORCES. 57 

worth. Lines are arbitrarily fixed across the centre of 
a plain, or along the summit of a mountain, which it is 
a case of war to pass. Belgium defends her flats with a 
hundred thousand men, and the marshes of Holland are 
secured by sixty thousand Dutch. The State of Dessau, 
in Germany, threatens its neighbours with fifteen hun- 
dred soldiers, while Eeuss guards its dignity and inde- 
pendence with three hundred infantry and fifty horse. 
But the Great Powers, as they are called, take away 
from the peaceable and remunerative employments of 
trade or agriculture an amount of labour which would 
be an incalculable increase to the riches and happiness 
of the world. The aggregate soldiery of Europe is up- 
wards of five millions of men, — -just eleven times the 
largest calculation of the Eoman legions. The ships of 
Europe — to the smaller of which the greatest galleys of 
the ancient world would scarcely serve as tenders — ■ 
amount to 2113. The number of guns they carry, against 
which there is nothing we can take as a measure of 
value in ancient warfare, but which are now the greatest 
and surest criterions of military power, amounts to 
45,367. But this does not give so clear a view of tho 
alteration in relative power as is yielded by an inspec- 
tion of some of the separate items. Gaul, included 
within the Rhine, was kept in order by six or seven 
legions. The French empire has on foot an army of six 
hundred and fifty thousand men, and a fleet of four hun- 
dred sail. Britain, which was garrisoned by thirty 
thousand men, had, in 1855, an army at home and abroad 
of six hundred and sixty thousand men, and a fleet of 
five hundred and ninety-one ships of war, with an arma- 
ment of seventeen thousand guns. The disjointed States 
which now constitute the Empire of Austria, and which 
occupied eight legions in their defence, are now in pos- 
session of an army of six hundred thousand men ; and 



68 SECOND CENTURY. 

Prussia, whose army exceeds half a million of soldiers, 

was unheard of except in the discussions of geographers.* 

With the death of the excellent Marcus Aurelius the 

■ ffolden a2;e came to a close. Commodus sat on 

A.D. 181. to & 

the throne, and renewed the wildest atrocities 
of the previous century. Nero was not more cruel — 



* The following is a carefully compiled table of the forces of Europe in 
the year 1854-55. Since that time the Russian fleet has been destroyed, but 
the diminution has been more than counterbalanced by the increased navies 
of the other powers. 

Military Forces of Europe in 1855. 

Men. Ships. Guns. 

Austria 650,000 102 752 

Bavaria 239,886 

Belgium 100,000 

Denmark 75,169 120 880 

France 650,000 407 11,773 

Germany 452,473 

Great Britain 265,000* 591 17,291 

Greece 10,226 25 143 

Ionian Isles 3,000 4 

Modena and Parma 6,302 

Netherlands 58,647 84 2,000 

Papal States 11,274 

Portugal 33,000 44 404 

Prussia 525,000 50 250 

Russia 699,000 207 9,000 

Sardinia 48,088 40 900 

Sicilies 106,264 29 444 

Spain 75,000 410 1,530 

Sweden 167,000 

Switzerland, 108,000 

Tuscany 16,930 

Turkey 310,970 

4,611,229 2113 45,367 2 

1 Indian army 250,000. and militia 145,000, not included; making a total of 600,000. 

2 Taking an average of ten men to each gun, the sailors will be 452^670; which gives 
a total of fighting-men, 5,001,899 ! ! ! 



THE EMPIRE BOUGHT. 59 

Domitian was not so reckless of human life. He fought 
in the arena against weakly-armed adversaries, and 
slew them without remorse. He polluted the whole city 
with blood, and made money by selling permissions to 
murder. Thirteen years exhausted the patience of the 
world, and a justifiable assassination put an end to his life. 
There was an old man of the name of Pertinax, originally 
a nickname derived from his obstinate or pertinacious 
disposition, who now made his appearance on the throne 
and perished in three months. It chanced that a certain 
rich man of the name of Didius was giving a supper the 
night of the murder to some friends. The dishes were 
rich, and the wine delicious. Inspired by the good cheer, 
the guests said, " Why don't you buy the empire ? The 
soldiers have proclaimed that they will give it to the 
highest bidder." Didius knew the amount of his treasure, 
and was ambitious : he got up from table and hurried to 
the Praetorian camp. On the way he met the mutilated 
body of the murdered Pertinax, dragged through the 
streets with, savage exultation. Nothing daunted, he 
arrived at the soldiers' tents. Another had been before 
him — Sulpician, the father-in-law and friend of the late 
emperor. A bribe had been offered to each soldier, so 
large that they were about to conclude the bargain ; but 
Didius bade many sesterces more. The greedy soldiery 
looked from one to the other, and shouted with delight, 
as each new advance was made. At last Sulpician was 
silent, and Didius had purchased the Eoman world 
at the price of upwards of £200 to each soldier 
of the Praetorian guard. He entered the palace in state, 
and concluded the supper, which had been interrupted 
at his own house, on the viands prepared for Pertinax. 
But the excitement of the auction-room was too pleasant 
to be left to the troops in Eome. Offers were made to 
the legions in all the provinces, and Didius was threatened 



60 SECOND CENTURY. 



on every side. Even the distant garrisons of Britain 
named a candidate for the throne; and Claudius Albinus 
assumed the imperial purple, and crossed over into Gaul. 
More irritated still, the army in Syria elected its general, 
Pescennius Niger, emperor, and he prepared to dispute 
the prize; but quietly, steadily, with stern face and un- 
relenting heart, advancing from province to province, 
keeping his forces in strict subjection, and laying claim 
to supreme authority by the mere strength of his in- 
domitable will, came forward Septimius Severus, and 
both^ the pretenders saw that their fate was sealed. 
Illyria and Gaul recognised his title at once. Albinus 
was happy to accept from him the subordinate title of 
Caesar, and to rule as his lieutenant. Didius, whose bar- 
gain turned out rather ill, besought him to be content 
with half the empire. Severus slew the messengers 
who brought this proposition, and advanced in grim 
silence. The Senate assembled, and, by way of a 
pleasant reception for the Illyrian chief, requested 
Didius to prepare for death. The executioners found 
him clinging to life with unmanly tenacity, and killed 
him when he had reigned but seventy days. One other 
competitor remained, the general of the Syrian army— 
the closest friend of Severus, but now separated from 
him by the great temptation of an empire in dispute. 
This was Niger, from whom an obstinate resistance was 
expected, as he was equally famous for his courage and 
his skill. But fortune was on the side of Severus. Niger 
was conquered after a short struggle, and his head pre- 
sented to the victor. Was Albinus still to live, and ap- 
proach so near the throne as to have the rank of Caesar ? 
Assassins were employed to murder him, but he escaped 
their assault. The treachery of Severus brought many 
supporters to his rival. The Eoman armies were ranged 
in hostile camps. Severus again was fortunate, and Al- 



SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS. 61 

binus, dashing towards him to engage in combat, was 
slain before his eyes. He watched his dying agonies 
for some time, and then forced his horse to trample on 
the corpse. A man of harsh, implacable nature — not so 
much cruel as impenetrable to human feelings, and per- 
haps forming a just estimate of the favourable effect 
upon his fortunes of a disposition so calm, and yet so 
relentless. The Praetorians found they had appointed 
their master, and put the sword into his hand. He used 
it without remorse. He terrified the boldest with his 
imperturbable stillness; he summoned the seditious 
soldiery to wait on him at his camp. They were to 
come without arms, without their military dress, almost 
like suppliants, certainly not like the ferocious liber- 
tines they had been when they had sold the empire at 
the highest price. " Whoever of you wishes to live," 
said Severus, frowning coldly, " will depart from this, 
and never come within thirty leagues of Rome. Take 
their horses/' he added to the other troops who had 
surrounded the Praetorians, " take their accoutrements, 
and chase them out of my sight." Did the Senate 
receive a milder treatment ? On sending them the head 
of Albinus, he had written to the Conscript Fathers 
alarming them with the most dreadful threats. And 
now the time of execution had come. He made them 
an oration in praise of the proscriptions of Marius and 
Sylla, and forced them to deify the tyrant Commodus, 
who had hated them all his life. He then gave a signal 
to his train, and the streets ran with blood. All who 
had borne high office, all who were of distinguished 
birth, all who were famous for their wealth or popular 
with the citizens, were put to death. He crossed over 
to England and repressed a sedition there. His son 
Caracalla accompanied him, and commenced his career 
of warlike ardour and frightful ferocity, which can only 

6 



62 SECOND CENTURY. 

be explained on the ground of his being mad. lie tried 
even to murder his father, in open day, in the sight of 
the soldiers. He was stealing upon the old man, when 
a cry from the legion made him turn round. His in- 
flexible eye fell upon Caracalla — the sword dropped from 
his unfilial hand — and dreadful anticipations of vengeance 
filled the assembly. The son was pardoned, but his ac- 
complices, whether truly or falsely accused, perished by 
cruel deaths. At last the emperor felt his end approach. 
He summoned his sons Caracalla and Geta into his pre- 
sence, recommended them to live in unity, and ended by 
the advice which has become the standing maxim of 
military despots, " Be generous to the soldiers, and 
trample on all beside." 

With this hideous incarnation of unpitying firmness 
on the throne — hopeless of the future, and with dangers 
accumulating on every side, the Second Century came to 
an end, leaving the amazing contrast between its mise- 
rable close and the long period of its prosperity by which 
it will be remembered in all succeeding time. 



THIRD CENTURY. 



A.D. 



ISmperors. 

Septimius Severus— (continued.) Fifth Persecution of 
the Christians. 
211. Caracalla and Geta. 

217. Macrinus. 

218. Heliogabalus. 

222. Alexander Severus. 

235. Maximin. Sixth Persecution. 

238. Maximus and Balblnus. 

238. Gordian. 

244. Philip the Arabian. 

249. Decius. Seventh Persecution. 

251. Vibius. 

251. Gallus. 

254. Valerian. Eighth Persecution. 

260. Gallien. 

2G8. Claudius the Second. 

270. Aurelian. Ninth Persecution. 

275. Tacitus. 

276. Florian. 

277. Probus. 

278. Carus. 

278. Carinus and Numerian. 

284. Diocletian and Maximian. Tenth and Last Perse- 
cution. 

authors* 

Clement or Alexandria, Dion Cassius, Origen, Cyprian, 
Plotinus, Longinus, Hippolitus Portuensis, Julius Africa- 

nus, Celsus, Origen. 



THE THIRD CENTURY. 

ANARCHY AND CONFUSION GROWTH OF THE CHRISTIAN 

CHURCH. 

We are now in the twelfth year of the Third Century. 
Septimius Severus has died at York, and Caracalla is let 
loose like a famished tiger upon Rome. He invites his 
brother G-eta to meet him to settle some family feud in 
the apartment of their mother, and stabs him in her 
arms. The rest of his reign is worthy of this beginning, 
and it would be fatiguing and perplexing to the memory 
to record his other acts. Fortunately it is not required; 
nor is it necessary to follow minutely the course of his 
successors. What we require is only a general view of 
the proceedings of this century, and that can be gained 
without wading through all the blood and horrors with 
which the throne of the world is surrounded. Conclu- 
sive evidence was obtained in this century that the 
organization of Roman government was defective in 
securing the first necessities of civilized life. When we 
talk of civilization, we are too apt to limit the meaning 
of the word to its mere embellishments, such as arts and 
sciences; but the true distinction between it and bar- 
barism is, that the one presents a state of society under 
the protection of just and well-administered law, and 
the other is left to the chance government of brute force. 
There was now great wealth in Rome — great luxury — ■ 
a high admiration of painting, poetry, and sculpture — 
much learning, and probably infinite refinement of 
manners and address. But it was not a civilized state. 

E 6* 65 



66 THIRD CENTURY. 

Life was of no value — property was not secure. A 
series of madmen seized supreme authority, and over- 
threw all the distinctions between right and Avrong. 
Murder was legalized, and rapine openly encouraged. 
It is a sort of satisfaction to perceive that few of those 
atrocious malefactors escaped altogether the punishment 
of their crimes. If Caracalla slays his brother and 
orders a peaceable province to be destroyed, there is a 
Macrinus at hand to put the monster to death. But 
„_ Macrinus, relying on the goodness of his inten- 

A.D. 218. > J iD & 

tions, neglects the soldiery, and is supplanted by 
a boy of seventeen — so handsome that he won the admi- 
ration of the rudest of the legionaries, and so gentle 
and captivating in his manners that he strengthened 
the effect his beauty had produced. He was priest of 
the Temple of the Sun at Emesa in Phoenicia; and by 
the arts of his grandmother, who was sister to one of 
the former empresses, and the report that she cun- 
ningly spread abroad that he was the son of their 
favourite Caracalla, the affection of the dissolute soldiery 
knew no bounds. Macrinus was soon slaughtered, and 
the long-haired priest of Baal seated on the throne of 
the Caesars, under the name of Heliogabalus. As might 
be expected, the sudden alteration in his fortunes was 
fatal to his character. All the excesses of his prede- 
cessors were surpassed. His extravagance rapidly ex- 
hausted the resources of the empire. His floors were 
spread with gold-dust. His dresses, jewels, and golden 
ornaments were never worn twice, but went to his 
slaves and parasites. He created his grandmother a 
member of the Senate, with rank next after the consuls; 
and established a rival Senate, composed of ladies, pre- 
sided over by his mother. Their jurisdiction was not 
very* hurtful to the State, for it only extended to dresses 
and precedence of ranks, and the etiquette to be observed 



ALEXANDER SEVERUS. 67 

in visiting each other. But the evil dispositions of the 
emperor were shown in other ways. He had a cousin of 
the name of Alexander, and entertained an unbounded 
jealousy of his popularity with the soldiers. Attempts 
at poison and direct assassination were resorted to in 
vain. The public sympathy began to rise in his favour. 
The Praetorians formally took him under their protec- 
tion; and when Heliogabalus, reckless of their menaces, 
again attempted the life of Alexander, the troops re- 
volted, proclaimed death to the infatuated emperor, and 
slew him and his mother at the same time. 

Alexander was now enthroned — a youth of sixteen; 
gifted with higher qualities than the debased 
century in which he lived could altogether ap- 
preciate. But the origin of his noblest sentiments is 
traced to the teaching he had received from his mother, 
in which the precepts of Christianity were not omitted. 
When he appointed the governor of a province, he pub- 
lished his name some time before, and requested if any 
one knew of a disqualification, to have it sent in for his 
consideration. " It is thus the Christians appoint their 
pastors," he said, " and I will do the same with my repre- 
sentatives." When his justice, moderation, and equity 
were fully recognised, the beauty of the quotation, which 
was continually in his mouth, was admired by all, 
even though they were ignorant of the book it came 
from: "Do unto others as you would that they should 
do unto you." He trusted the wisest of his counsellors, 
the great legalists of the empire, with the introduction 
of new laws to curb the wickedness of the time. But 
the multiplicity of laws proves the decline of states. 
In the ancient Eome of the kings and earlier consuls, 
the statutes were contained in forty decisions, which 
were afterwards enlarged into the laws of the Twelve 
Tables, consisting of one hundred and fifty texts. The 



68 



THIRD CENTURY. 



profligacy of some emperors, the vanity of others, had 
loaded the statute-book with an innumerable mass of 
edicts, senatus-consultums, praetorial rescripts, and cus- 
tomary laws. It was impossible to extract order or 
regularity from such a chaos of conflicting rules. The 
great work was left for a later prince; at present we 
can only praise the goodness of the emperor's intention. 
But Alexander, justly called Severus, from the simpli- 
city of his life and manners, has held the throne too 
long. The Prsetorians have been thirteen years without 
the donation consequent on a new accession. 

Among the favourite leaders selected by Alexander 
for their military qualifications was one Maximin, a 
Thracian peasant, of whose strength and stature incredi- 
ble things are told. He was upwards of eight feet high, 
could tire down a horse at the gallop on foot, could 
break its leg by a blow of his hand, could overthrow 
thirty wrestlers without drawing breath, and maintained 
this prodigious force by eating forty pounds of meat, 
and drinking an amphora and a half, or twelve quarts, 
of wine. This giant had the bravery for which his 
countrymen the Groths have always been celebrated, 
lie rose to high rank in the Roman service ; and when 
at last nothing seemed to stand between him and the 
throne but his patron and benefactor, ambition blinded 
him to every thing but his own advancement. He mur- 
dered the wise and generous Alexander, and presented 
for the first time in history the spectacle of a barbarian 
master of the Roman world. Other emperors had been 
born in distant portions of the empire j an African had 
trampled on Roman greatness in the person of Septi- 
mius Severus; a Phoenician priest had disgraced the 
purple in the person of Heliogabalus; Africa, however, 
was a Roman province, and Emesa a Roman town. But 
here sat the colossal representative of the terrible Goths 



MAXIMIN. 09 

of Thrace, speaking a language half Getic, half Latin, 
which no one could easily understand; fierce, haughty, 
and revengeful, and cherishing a ferocious hatred of the 
subjects who trembled before him — a hatred probably 
implanted in him in his childhood by the patriotic songs 
with which the warriors of his tribe kept alive their 
enmity and contempt for the Eoman name. The Eoman 
name had indeed by this time lost all its authority. The 
army, recruited from all parts of the empire, and in- 
cluding a great number of barbarians in its ranks, was 
no longer a bulwark against foreign invasion. Maximin, 
bestowing the chief commands on Pannonians and other 
mercenaries, treated the empire as a conquered country. 
He seized on all the wealth he could discover — melted 
all the golden statues, as valuable from their artistic 
beauty as for the metal of which they were composed — 
and was threatening an approach to Rome to extermi- 
nate the Senate and sack the devoted town. In this 
extremity the Senate resumed its long-forgotten power, 
and named as emperors two men of the name of Gordian 
— father and son — with instructions "to resist the 
enemy." But father and son perished in a few weeks, 
and still the terrible Goth came on. His son, a giant 
like himself, but beautiful as the colossal statue of a 
young Apollo, shared in all the feelings of his father. 
Terrified at its approaching doom, the Senate once more 
nominated two men to the purple, Maximus and Bal- 
binus: Balbinus, the favourite, perhaps, of the aristo- 
cracy, by the descent he claimed from an illustrious 
ancestry ; while Maximus recommended himself to the 
now perverted taste of the commonalty by having been 
a carter, ^either was popular with the army; and, to 
please the soldiers, a son or nephew of the younger 
Gordian was associated with them on the throne. But 
nothing could have resisted the infuriated legions of the 



' u THIRD CENTURY. 

gigantic Maximin , they were marching with wonderful 
expedition towards their revenge. At Aquileia they 
met an opposition ; the town shut its gates and manned 
its walls, for it knew what would be the fate of a city 
given up to the tender mercies of the Goths. Mean- 
while the approach of the destroyer produced great 
agitation in Eome. The people rose upon the Praeto- 
rians, and enlisted the gladiators on their side. Many 
thousands were slain, and at last a peace was made by 
the intercession of the youthful Gordian. Glad of the 
cessation of this civic tumult, the population of Eome 
betook itself to the theatres and shows. Suddenly, while 
the games were going on, it was announced that the 
army before Aquileia had mutinied and that both the 
„„„ Maximins were slain. All at once the amphi- 

a.d. 235. r 

theatre was emptied ; by an impulse of grateful 
piety, the emperors and people hurried into the temples 
of the gods, and offered up thanks for their deliverance. 
The wretched people were premature in their rejoicing. 
In less than three months the spoiled Praetorians were 
offended with the precaution taken by the emperors in 
surrounding themselves with German guards. They 
assaulted the palace, and put Maximus and Balbinus 
to death. Gordian the Third was now sole emperor, 
and the final struggle with the barbarians drew nearer 
and nearer. 

Constantly crossing the frontiers, and willingly re- 
ceived in the Eoman ranks, the communities who had 
been long settled on the Roman confines were not the 
utterly uncultivated tribes which their name would seem 
to denote. There was a conterminous civilization which 
made the two peoples scarcely distinguishable at their 
point of contact, but which died off as tho distance 
from the Eoman line increased. Thus, an original settler 
on the eastern bank of the Rhine was probably as cul- 



BARBARIANS. 71 

tivated and intelligent as a Roman colonist on the other 
side ; but farther up, at the Weser and the Elbe, the old 
ferocity and roughness remained. Fresh importations 
from the unknown East were continually taking place ; 
the dwellers in the plains of Pannonia, now habituated 
to pasturage and trade, found safety from the hordes 
which pressed upon them from their own original settle- 
ments beyond the Caucasus, by crossing the boundary 
river; and by this means the banks were held by cognate 
but hostile peoples, who could, however, easily be re- 
conciled by a joint expedition against Rome. New com- 
binations had taken place in the interior of the great 
expanses not included in the Roman limits. The Ger- 
mans were no longer the natural enemies of the empire. 
They furnished many soldiers for its defence, and several 
chiefs to command its forces. But all round the external 
circuit of those half-conciliated tribes rose up vast con- 
federacies of warlike nations. There were Cheruski, and 
Sicambri, and Attuarians, and Bruttuarians, and Catti, 
all regularly enrolled under the name of " Franks," or 
the brave. The Sarmatians or Sclaves performed the 
same part on the northeastern frontier; and we have 
already seen that the irresistible Goths had found their 
way, one by one, across the boundary, and cleared the 
path for their successors. The old enemies of Rome on 
the extreme east, the Parthians, had fallen under the 
power of a renovated mountain-race, and of a king, who 
founded the great dynasty of the Sassanides, and claimed 
the restoration of Egypt and Armenia as ancient de- 
pendencies of the Persian crown. To resist all these, 
there was, in the year 241, only a gentle-tempered youth, 
dressed in the purple which had so lost its original gran- 
deur, and relying for his guidance on the wisdom of his 
tutors, and for his life on the forbearance of the Prseto- 
rians. The tutors were wise and just, and victory at 



72 THIRD CENTURY. 

first gave some sort of dignity to the reign of Gordian. 
The Franks were conquered at Mayence ; but Gordian, 
three years after, was murdered in the East ; and 
Philip, an Arabian, whose father had been a 
robber of the desert, was acknowledged emperor by 
senate and army. Treachery, ambition, and murder 
pursued their course. There was no succession to the 
throne. Sometimes one general, luckier or wiser than 
the rest, appeared the sole governor of the State. At 
other times there were numberless rivals all claiming 
the empire and threatening vengeance on their op- 
ponents. Yet amidst this tumult of undistinguishable 
pretenders, fortune placed at the head of affairs some 
of the best and greatest men whom the Eoman world 
ever produced. There was Yalerian, whom all parties 
agreed in considering the most virtuous and en- 

A.D. ZdO» 

lightened man of his time. Scarcely any oppo- 
sition was made to his promotion ; and yet, with all his 
good qualities, he was the man to whom Rome owed the 
greatest degradation it had yet sustained. He was 
taken prisoner by Sapor, the Persian king, and con- 
demned, with other captive monarchs, to draw the car 
of his conqueror. No offers of ransom could deliver the 
brave and unfortunate prince. He died amid his de- 
riding enemies, who hung up his skin as an offering to 
their gods. Then, after some years, in which there were 
twenty emperors at one time, with army drawn up 
against army, and cities delivered to massacre and rapine 
by all parties in turn, there arose one of the strong 
minds which make themselves felt throughout a whole 
period, and arrest for a while the downward course of 
states. The emperor Probus, son of a man who 
had originally been a gardener, had distinguished 
himself under Aurelian, the conqueror of Palmyra, and, 
having survived all his competitors, had time to devote 



PROBUS. t6 

himself to the restoration of discipline and the introduc- 
tion of purer laws. His victories over the encroaching 
barbarians were decided, but ineffectual. New myriads 
still pressed forward to take the place of the slain. On 
one occasion he crossed the Ehine in pursuit of the re- 
volted Germans, overtook them at the Necker, and 
killed in battle four hundred thousand men. Nine kings 
threw themselves at the emperor's feet. Many thousand 
barbarians enlisted in the Roman army. Sixty great 
cities were taken, and made offerings of golden crowns. 
The whole country was laid waste. " There was nothing 
left," he boasted to the Senate, " but bare fields, as if 
they had never been cultivated." So much the worse 
for the Romans. The barbarians looked with keener 
eyes across the river at the rich lands which had never 
been ravaged, and sent messages to all the tribes in the 
distant forests, that, having no occasion for pruning- 
hooks, they had turned them into swords. But Probus 
showed a still more doubtful policy in other quarters. 
"When he conquered the Yandals and Burgundians, he 
sent their warriors to keep the Caledonians in subjection 
on the Tyne. The Britons he transported to Mcesia or 
Greece. What intermixtures of race may- have arisen 
from these transplantations it is impossible to say j but 
the one feeling was common to all the barbarians, that 
Eome was weak and they were strong. He settled a 
large detachment of Franks on the shores of the Black 
Sea ; and of these an almost incredible but well-authen- 
ticated story is told. They seized or built themselves 
boats. They swept through the Dardanelles, and ravaged 
the isles of Greece. They pursued their piratical career 
down the Mediterranean, passed the pillars of Hercules 
into the Great Sea, and, rounding Spain and France, rowed 
up the Elbe into the midst of their astonished country- 
men, who had long given them up for dead. A fatal 

7 



74 THIRD CENTURY. 

adventure this for the safety of the Eoman shores ; for 
there were the wild fishermen of Friesland, and the 
audacious Angles of Schleswig and llolstein, who heard 
of this strange exploit, and saw that no coast was too 
distant to be reached by their oar and sail. But if these 
forced settlements of barbarians on Eoman soil were im- 
politic, the generous Probus did not feel their bad effect. 
His warlike qualities awed his foes, and his inflexible 
justice was appreciated by the hardy warriors of the 
North, who had not yet sunk under the debasing civili- 
zation of Eome. In Asia his arms were attended with 
equal success. He subdued the Persians, and extended 
his conquests into Ethiopia and the farthest regions of 
the East, bringing back some of its conquered natives to 
swell the triumph at Eome and terrify the citizens with 
their strange and hideous appearance. But Probus him- 
self must yield to the law which regulated the fate 
of Eoman emperors. He died by treachery and the 
sword. All that the empire could do was to join in the 
epitaph pronounced over him by the barbarians, " Here 
lies the emperor Probus, whose life and actions corre- 
sponded to his name." 

Three or four more fantastic figures, " which the like- 
ness of a kingly crown have on," pass before our eyes, 
and at last we observe the powerful and substantial form 
„„ , of Diocletian, and feel once more we have to do 

a.d. 284. • ' 

with a real man. A Druidess, we are told, had 
prophesied that he should attain his highest wish if he 
killed a wild boar. In all his hunting expeditions he 
was constantly on the look-out, spear in hand, for an en- 
counter with the long-tusked monster. Unluckily for a 
man who had offended Diocletian before, and who had 
basely murdered his predecessor, his name was Aper; 
and unluckily, also, aper is Latin for a boar. This fact 
will perhaps be thought to account for the prophecy. It 



TWO EMPERORS. 75 

accounts, at all events, for its fulfilment ; for, the wretched 
Aper being led before the throne, Diocletian descended 
the steps and plunged a dagger into his chest, exclaim- 
ing, " I have killed the wild boar of the prediction." 
This is a painful example of how unlucky it is to have 
a name that can be punned upon. Determined to secure 
the support of what he thought the strongest body in 
the State, he gratified the priests by the severest of all 
the many persecutions to which the Christians had been 
exposed. By way of farther showing his adhesion to 
the old faith, he solemnly assumed the name of Jove, 
and bestowed on his partner on the throne the inferior 
title of Hercules. In spite of these truculent and absurd 
proceedings, Diocletian was not altogether destitute of 
the softer feelings. The friend he associated with him 
on the throne — dividing the empire between them as too 
large a burden for one to sustain — was called Maximian. 
They had both originally been slaves, and had neither 
of them received a liberal education. Yet they pro- 
tected the arts, they encouraged literature, and were the 
patrons of modest merit wherever it could be found. 
They each adopted a Ca3sar, or lieutenant of the empire, 
and hoped that, by a legal division of duties among four, 
the ambition of their generals would be prevented. Bat 
the limits of the empire were too extended even for the 
vigilance of them all. In Britain, Carausius raised the 
standard of revolt, giving it the noble name of national 
independence ; and, with the instinctive wisdom which 
has been the safeguard of our island ever since, he 
rested his whole chance of success upon his fleet. Inva- 
sion was rendered impossible by the care with which he 
guarded the shore, and it is not inconceivable that even 
at that early time the maritime career of Britain might 
have been begun and maintained, if treason, as usual, 
had not cut short the efforts of Carausius, who was soon 



76 THIRD CENTURY. 

after murdered by his friend Allectus. The subdivision 
of the empire was a successful experiment as regarded 
its external safety, but within, it was the cause of bitter 
complaining. There were four sumptuous courts to be 
maintained, and four imperial armies to be paid. Taxes 
rose, and allegiance waxed cold. The Caesars were 
young, and looked probably with an evil eye on the two 
old men who stood between them and the name of em- 
peror. However it may be, after many victories and 
much domestic trouble, Diocletian resolved to lay aside 
the burden of empire and retire into private life. His 
colleague Maximian felt, or affected to feel, the same 
distaste for power, and on the same day they quitted the 
purple; one at Nicomedia, the other at Milan. Diocletian 
retired to Salona, a town in his native Dalmatia, and 
occupied himself with rural pursuits. He was asked 
after a while to reassume his authority, but he said to 
the persons who made him the request, "I wish you 
would come to Salona and see the cabbages I have 
planted with my own hands, and after that you would 
never wish me to remount the throne." 

The characteristic of this century is its utter confusion 
and want of order. There was no longer the unity even 
of despotism at Eome to make a common centre round 
which every thing revolved. There were tyrants and 
competitors for power in every quarter of the empire — 
no settled authority, no government or security, left. In 
the midst of this relaxation of every rule of life, grew 
surely, but unobserved, the Christian Church, which 
drew strength from the very helplessness of the civil 
state, and was forced, in self-defence, to establish a 
regular organization in order to extend to its members 
the inestimable benefits of regularity and law. Under 
many of the emperors Christianity was proscribed; its 
disciples were put to excruciating deaths, and their pro- 



THE EARLY CHURCH. 77 

perty* confiscated; but at that very time its inner de- 
velopment increased and strengthened. The community 
appointed its teachers, its deacons, its office-bearers of 
every kind ; it supported them in their endeavours — it 
yielded to their directions; and in time a certain amount 
of authority was considered to be inherent in the office 
of pastor, which extended beyond the mere expounding 
of the gospel or administration of the sacraments. The 
chief pastor became the guide, perhaps the judge, of the 
whole flock. While it is absurd, therefore, in those dis- 
astrous times of weakness and persecution to talk in 
pompous terms of the succession of the Bishops of Rome, 
and make out. vain catalogues of lordly prelates who 
sat on the throne of St. Peter, it is incontestable that, 
from the earliest period, the Christian converts held 
their meetings — by stealth indeed, and under fear of 
detection — and obeyed certain canons of their own con- 
stitution. These secret associations rapidly spread their 
ramifications into every great city of the empire. When 
by the friendship, or the fellowship, of the emperor, as 
in the case of the Arabian Philip, a pause was given to 
their fears and sufferings, certain buildings were set 
apart for their religious exercises ; and we read, during 
this century, of basilicas, or churches, in Eome and other 
towns. The subtlety of the Greek intellect had already 
led to endless heresies and the wildest departures from 
the simplicity of the gospel. The Western mind was 
more calm, and better adapted to be the lawgiver of a 
new order of society composed of elements so rough and 
discordant as the barbarians, whose approach was now 
inevitably foreseen. With its well-defined hierarchy — 
its graduated ranks, and the fitness of the offices for the 
purposes of their creation ; with its array of martyrs 
ready to suffer, and clear-headed leaders fitted to com- 
mand, the Western Church could look calmly forward 

7* 



78 THIRD CENTURY. 

to the time when its organization would make* it the 
most powerful; or perhaps the only, body in the State ; 
and so early as the middle of this century the seeds of 
worldly ambition developed themselves in a schism, not 
on a point of doctrine, but on the possession of authority. 
A double nomination had made the anomalous appoint- 
ment of two chief pastors at the same time. Neither 
would yield, and each had his supporters. All were 
under the ban of the civil power. They had recourse 
to spiritual weapons; and we read, for the first time in 
ecclesiastical history, of mutual excommunications. No- 
vatian — under his breath, however, for fear of being 
thrown to the wild beasts for raising a disturbance — 
thundered his anathemas against Cornelius as an in- 
truder, while Cornelius retorted by proclaiming Nova- 
tian an impostor, as he had not the concurrence of the 
people in his election. This gives us a convincing proof 
of the popular form of appointing bishops or presbyters 
in those early days, and prepares us for the energy with 
which the electors supported the authority of their 
favourite priests. 

But, while this new internal element was spreading 
life among the decayed institutions of the empire, we 
have, in this century, the first appearance, in great 
force, of the future conquerors and renovators of the 
body politic from without. It is pleasant to think that 
the centuries cast themselves more and more loose from 
their connection with Rome after this date, and that the 
barbarians can vindicate a separate place in history for 
themselves. In the first century, the bad emperor? 
broke the strength of Rome by their cruelty and extrava- 
gance. In the second century, the good emperors car- 
ried on the work of weakening the empire by the soft- 
en ing and enervating effects of their gentle and pro- 
tective policy. The third century unites the evil qualities 



BARBARIAN TRIBES. 79 



of the other two, for the people were equally rendered 
incapable of defending themselves by the unheard-of 
atrocities of some of the tyrants who oppressed them, 
and the mistaken measures of the more benevolent 
rulers, in committing the guardianship of the citizens to 
the swords of a foreign soldiery, leaving them but the 
wretched alternative of being ravaged and massacred 
by an irruption of savage tribes or pillaged and insulted 
by those in the emperor's pay. 

The empire had long been surrounded by its foes. It 
will suffice to read the long list of captives who were 
led in triumph behind the car of Aurelian when he re- 
turned from foreign war, to see the fearful array 
a.d. 273. of harsll . somlding names which have afterwards 
been softened into those of great and civilized nations. 
It is in following the course of some of these that we 
shall see how the present distribution of forces in Europe 
took place, and escape from the polluted atmosphere of 
Imperial Eome. In; that memorable triumph appeared 
Goths, Alans, Boxolans, Franks, Sarmatians, Yandals, 
Allemans, Arabs, Indians, Bactrians, Iberians, Saracens, 
Armenians, Persians, Palmyreans, Egyptians, and ten 
Gothic women dressed in men's apparel and fully armed. 
These were, perhaps, the representatives of a large body 
of female warriors, and are a sign of the recent settle- 
ment of the tribe to which they belonged. They had 
not yet given up the habits of their march, where all 
were equally engaged in carrying the property and arms 
of the nation, and where the females encouraged the 
young men of the expedition by witnessing and some- 
times sharing their exploits in battle. 

The triumph of Probus, when only seven years had 
passed, presents us with a list of the same peoples, often 
conquered but never subdued. Their defeats, indeed, 
had the double effect of showing to them their own 



80 THIRD CENTURY. 

ability to recruit their forces, and of strengthening the 
degraded people of Rome in the belief of their invinci- 
bility. After the loss of a battle, the Gothic or Burgun- 
dian chief fell back upon the confederated tribes in his 
rear ; a portion of his army either visited Eome in the 
character of captives, or enlisted in the ranks of the 
conquerors. In either ease, the wealth of the great 
city and the undefended state of the empire were per- 
manently fixed in their minds; the populace, on the 
other hand, had the luxury of a noble show and double 
rations of bread — the more ambitious of the emperors 
acting on the professed maxim that the citizen had no 
duty but to enjoy the goods provided for him by the go- 
verning power, and that if he was fed by public doles, and 
amused with public games, the purpose of his life was 
attained. The idlest man was the safest subject. A 
triumph was, therefore, more an instrument of degrada- 
tion than an encouragement to patriotic exertion. The 
name of Roman citizen was now, extended to all the 
inhabitants of the empire. The freeman of York was a 
Eoman citizen. Had he any patriotic pride in keeping 
the soil of Italy undivided? The nation had become 
too diffuse for the exercise of this local and combining 
virtue. The love of country, which in the small states 
of Greece secured the individual's affection to his native 
city, and yet was powerful enough to extend over the 
whole of the Hellenic territories, was lost altogether 
when it was required to expand itself over a region as 
wide as Europe. It is in this sense that empires fall to 
pieces by their own weight. The Eoman power broke 
up from within. Its religion was a source of division, 
not of union — its mixture of nations, and tongues, and 
usages, losl their cohesion. And nothing was left at the 
end of this century to preserve it from total dissolution, 
but the personal qualities of some great rulers and the 
memory of its former fame. 



FOURTH CENTURY. 



lEmpetocs. 





A.D. 








304. 


GrALERIUS and CONSTANTIUS. 




305. 


Maximin. 






306. 


CONSTANTINE. 






337. 


Constantine II. 


, Constans and 






CONSTANTIUS. 




361. 


Julian the Apostate. 




363. 


Jovian. 




A.D. 


West. 




A.D. East. 


364. 


Valentinian. 


364. Valens. 


367. 


Gratian. 






375. 


Valentinian II. 


379. Theodosius. 


395. 


HONORIUS 


. 


395. Arcadius. 



&uti)ors. 

Donatus, Eutropius, St. Athanasius, Ausonius, Claudian, 
Arnobius, (303,) Lactantius, (306,) Eusebius, (315,) Arius, (316,) 
Gregory Nazianzen, (320-389,) Basil the Great, Bishop of 
Cesarea, (330-379,) Ambrose, (340-397,) Augustine (353-429,) 
Theodoret, (386-457,) Martin, Bishop of Tours. 



THE FOUBTH CENTXTBY. 

THE REMOVAL TO CONSTANTINOPLE ESTABLISHMENT OP 

CHRISTIANITY APOSTASY OF JULIAN SETTLEMENT OP 

THE GOTHS. 

As the memory of the old liberties of Eome died out, 
a nearer approach was made to the ostentatious despot- 
isms of the East. Aurelian, in 270, was the first em- 
peror who encircled his head with a diadem ; and Dio- 
cletian, in 284, formed his court on the model of the 
most gorgeous royalties of Asia. On admission into his 
presence, the Eoman Senator, formerly the equal of the 
ruler, prostrated himself at his feet. Titles of the most 
unmanly adulation were lavished on the fortunate slave 
or herdsman who had risen to supreme power. He was 
clothed in robes of purple and violet, and loaded with 
an incalculable wealth of jewels and gold. It was from 
deep policy that Diocletian introduced this system. 
Ceremony imposes on the vulgar, and makes intimacy 
impossible. Etiquette is the refuge of failing power, 
and compensates by external show for inherent weak- 
ness, as stiffness and formality are the refuge of dulness 
and mediocrity in private life. There was now, there- 
fore, seated on the throne, which was shaken by every 
commotion, a personage assuming more majestic rank, 
and affecting far loftier state and dignity, than Augustus 
had ventured on while the strength of the old Eepublic 
gave irresistible force to the new empire, or than the 
Antonines had dreamt of when the prosperity of Eome 
was apparently at its height. But there was still some 

83 



84 FOURTH CENTURY. 

feeling, if not of self-respect, at least of resistance to 
pretension, in the populace and Senators of the capital. 
Diocletian visited Eome but once. He was attacked in 
lampoons, and ridiculed in satirical songs. His colleague 
established his residence in the military post of Milan. 
We are not, therefore, to feel surprised that an Oriental- 
ized authority sought its natural seat in the land of 
ancient despotisms, and that many of the emperors had 
cast longing eyes on the beautiful towns of Asia Minor, 
and even on the far-off cities of Mesopotamia, as more 
congenial localities for their barbaric splendours. By a 
sort of compromise between his European origin and 
Asiatic tastes, the emperor Constantine, after many 
struggles with his competitors, having attained the sole 
authority, transferred the seat of empire from Rome to 
a city he had built on the extreme limits of Europe, and 
only divided from Asia by a narrow sea. All succeeding 
ages have agreed in extolling the situation of this city, 
called, after its founder, Constantinople, as the finest 
that could have been chosen. All ages, from the day of 
its erection till the hour in which we live, have agreed 
that it is fitted, in the hands of a great and enterprising 
power, to be the metropolis and arbiter of the world ; 
and Constantinople is, therefore^ condemned to the 
melancholy fate of being the useless and unappreciated 
capital of a horde of irreclaimable barbarians. To this 
magnificent city Constantine removed the throne in 
329, and for nearly a thousand years after that, whilo 
Eome was sacked in innumerable invasions, and all the 
capitals of Europe were successively occupied by con- 
tending armies, Constantinople, safe in her two narrow 
outlets, and rich in her command of the two continents, 
continued unconquered, and even unassailed. 

Eome was stripped, that Constantinople might be 
filled. All the wealth of Italy was carried across the 



CONSTANTINOPLE. 85 

iEo;ean. The Roman Senator was invited to remove 
with his establishment. He found, on arriving at his 
new home, that by a complimentary attention of the 
emperor, a fac-simile of his Roman palace had been 
prepared for him on the Propontis. The seven hills of 
the new capital responded to the seven hills of the old. 
There were villas for retirement along the smiling 
shores of the Dardanelles or of the Bosphorus, as fine in 
climate, and perhaps equal in romantic beauty, to Baise 
or Brundusium. There was a capital, as noble a piece 
of architecture as the one they had left, but without the 
sanctity of its thousand years of existence, or the glory 
of its unnumbered triumphs. One omission was the 
subject of remark and lamentation. The temples were 
nowhere to be seen. The images of the gods were left 
at Rome in the solitude of their deserted shrines, for 
Constantine had determined that Constantinople should, 
from its very foundation, be the residence of a Christian 
people. Churches were built, and a priesthood ap- 
pointed. Yet, with the policy which characterized the 
Church at that time, he made as little change as possible 
in the external forms. There is still extant a transfer 
of certain properties from the old establishment to the 
new. There are contributions of wax for the candles, 
of frankincense and myrrh for the censers, and vestures 
for the officiating priests as before. Only the object of 
worship is changed, and the images of the heathen gods 
and heroes are replaced with statues of the apostles and 
martyrs. 

It is difficult to gather a true idea of this first of the 
Christian emperors from the historians of after-times. 
The accounts of him by contemporary writers are equally 
conflicting. The favourers of the old superstition de- 
scribe him as a monster of perfidy and cruelty. The 
Church, raised to supremacy by his favour, sees nothing 

8 



86 FOURTH CENTURY. 

in him but the greatest of men — the seer of visions, the 
visible favourite of the Almighty, and the predestined 
overthrower of the powers of evil. The easy credulity 
of an emancipated people believed whatever the flattery 
of the courtiers invented. His mother Helena made a 
journey to Jerusalem, and was rewarded for the pious 
pilgrimage by the discovery of the True Cross. Chapels 
and altars were raised upon all the places famous in 
Christian story ; relics were collected from all quarters, 
and we are early led to fear that the simplicity of the 
gospel is endangered by its approach to the throne, 
and that Constantine's object was rather to raise and 
strengthen a hierarchy of ecclesiastical supporters than 
to give full scope to the doctrine of truth. But not the 
less wonderful, not the less by the divine appointment, 
was this unhoped-for triumph of Christianity, that its 
advancement formed part of the ambitious scheme of a 
worldly and unprincipled conqueror. Rather it may be 
taken as one among the thousand proofs with which 
history presents us, that the greatest blessings to man- 
kind are produced irrespective of the character or quali- 
ties of the apparent author. A warrior is raised in the 
desert when required to be let loose upon a worn-out 
society as the scourge of God; a blood-stained soldier 
is placed on the throne of the world when the time has 
come for the earthly predominance of the gospel. But 
neither is Attila to be blamed nor Constantine to be 
praised. 

It was the spirit of his system of government to form 
every society on a strictly monarchical model. There 
was everywhere introduced a clearly-defined subordina- 
tion of ranks and dignities. Diocletian, we saw, sur- 
rounded the throne with a state and ceremony which 
kept the imperial person sacred from the common gaze. 
Constantine perfected his work by establishing a titled 



NEW NOBILITY. 87 

nobility, who were to stand between the throne and the 
people, giving dignity to the one, and impressing fresh 
awe upon the other. In all previous ages it had been 
the office that gave impoi'tance to the man. To be a 
member of the Senate was a mark of distinction ; a long 
descent from a great historic name was looked on with 
respect ; and the heroic deeds of the thousand years of 
Eoman struggle had founded an aristocracy which owed 
its high position either to personal actions or hereditary 
claims. But now that the emperors had so long con- 
centrated in themselves all the great offices of the State 
— now that the bad rulers of the first century had de- 
graded the Senate by filling it with their creatures, the 
good rulers of the second century had made it merely 
the recorder of their decrees, and the anarchy of the 
third century had changed or obliterated its functions 
altogether — there was no way left to the ambitious 
Eoman to distinguish himself except by the favour of 
the emperor. The throne became, as it has since con- 
tinued in all strictly monarchical countries, the fountain 
of honour. It was not the people who could name a 
man to the consulship or appoint him to the command 
of an army. It was not even' in the power of the 
emperor to find offices of dignity for all whom he wished 
to advance. So a method was discovered by which 
vanity or friendship could be gratified, and employment 
be reserved for the deserving at the same time. Instead 
of endangering an expedition against the Parthians by 
intrusting it to a rich and powerful courtier who desired 
to have the rank of general, the emperor simply named 
him ISTobilissimus, or Patricius, or Illustris, and the 
gratified favourite, the "most noble," the "patrician/' 
or the " illustrious," took place with the highest officers 
of the State. A certain title gave him equal rank with 
the Senator, the judge, or the consul. The diversity of 



0° FOURTH CENTURY. 

these honorary distinctions became very great. There 
were the clarissimi — the perfectissimi — and the egregii 
— bearing the same relative dignity in the court-guide 
of the fourth century, as the dukes, marquises, earls, 
and viscounts of the peerage-books of the present day. 
But so much did all distinction flow from proximity to 
the throne, that all these high-sounding names owed 
their value to the fact of their being bestowed on the 
associates of the sovereign. The word Count, which 
is still the title borne by foreign nobles, comes from the 
Latin word which means " companion." There was a 
Comes, or Companion, of the Sacred Couch, or lord 
chamberlain — the Companion of the Imperial Service, 
or lord high steward — a Companion of the Imperial 
Stables, or lord high constable ; through all these digni- 
taries, step above step, the glorious ascent extended, till 
it ended in the Companion of Private Affairs, or con- 
fidential secretary. At the head of all, sacred and un- 
approachable, stood the embodied Power of the Eoman 
world, who, as he had given titles to all the magnates of 
his court, heaped also a great many on himself. His 
principal appellation, however, was not as in our degene- 
rate days "Majesty," whether "Most Catholic," "Most 
Christian," or "Most Orthodox," but consisted in the 
rather ambitious attribute — eternity. " Your Eternity" 
was the phrase addressed to some miserable individual 
whose reign was ended in a month. It was proposed by 
this division of the Eoman aristocracy to furnish the 
empire with a body for show and a body for use ; the 
latter consisting of the real generals of the armies and 
administrators of the provinces. And with this view 
the two were kept distinct; but military discipline 
suffered by this partition. The generals became discon- 
tented when they saw wealth and dignities heaped upon 
the titular nobles of the court; and to prevent the danger 



TAXES. 89 

arising from ill will among the legions on the frontier, 
the emperor withdrew the best of his soldiers from the 
posts where they kept the barbarians in check, and 
entirely destroyed their military spirit by separating 
them into small bodies and stationing them in towns. 
This exposed the empire to the foreign foes who still 
menaced it from the other side of the boundary, and 
gave fresh settlements in the heart of the country to the 
thousands of barbarian youth who had taken service 
with the eagles. In every legion there was a consider- 
able proportion of this foreign element : in every district 
of the empire, therefore, there were now settled the ad- 
vanced guards of the unavoidable invasion. Men with 
barbaric names, which the Eomans could not pronounce, 
walked about Eoman towns dressed in Eoman uniforms 
and clothed with Eoman titles. There were consulars 
and patricians in Eavenna and Naples, whose fathers 
had danced the war-dance of defiance when beginning 
their march from the Yistula and the Carpathian range. 
All these troops must be supported — all these digni- 
taries maintained in luxury. How was this done? 
The ordinary revenue of the empire in the time of Con- 
stantine has been computed at forty millions of our 
money a year. Not a very large amount when you con- 
sider the number of the population ; but this is the sum 
which reached the treasury. The gross amount must 
have been far larger, and an ingenious machinery was in- 
vented by which the tax was rigorously collected ; and 
this machinery, by a ludicrous perversion of terms, was 
made to include one of the most numerous classes of the 
artificial nobility created by the imperial will. In all 
the towns of the empire some little remains were still 
to be found of the ancient municipal government, of 
which practically they had long been deprived. There 
were nominal magistrates still; and among these the 



90 FOURTH CENTURY. 

Curials held a distinguished rank. They were the men 
who, in the days of freedom, had filled the civic dignities 
of their native city — the aldermen, we should perhaps 
call them, or, more nearly, the justices of the peace. 
They were now ranked with the peerage, but with cer- 
tain duties attached to their elevation which few can have 
regarded in the light of privilege or favour. To qualify 
them for rank, they were bound to be in possession of a 
certain amount of land. They were, therefore, a terri- 
torial aristocracy, and never was any territorial aris- 
tocracy more constantly under the consideration of the 
government. It was the duty of the curials to distri- 
bute the tax-papers in their district ; but, in addition to 
this, it was unfortunately their duty to see that the sum 
assessed on the town and neighbourhood was paid up to 
the last penny. When there was any deficiency, was 
the emperor to suffer? Were the nobilissimi, the pa- 
tricii, the egregii, to lose their salaries ? Oh, no ! As long 
as the now ennobled curial retained an acre of his estate, 
or could raise a mortgage on his house, the full amount 
was extracted. The tax went up to Eome, and the 
curial, if there had been a poor's house in those days, 
would have gone into it — for he was stripped of all. His 
farm was seized, his cattle were escheated ; and when the 
defalcation was very great, himself, his wife and children 
were led into the market and sold as slaves. Nothing 
so rapidly destroyed what might have been the germ of 
a middle class as this legalized spoliation of the smaller 
landholders. Below this rank there was absolutely 
nothing left of the citizenship of ancient times. Artifi- 
cers and workmen formed themselves into companies ; 
but the trades were exercised principally by slaves for 
the benefit of their owners. These slaves formed now 
by far the greatest part of the Eoman population, and 
though their lot had gradually become softened as their 



CONDITION OF SLAVES. 91 

numbers increased, and the domestic bondsman had 
little to complain of except the greatest of all sorrows, 
the loss of freedom, the position of the rural labourers 
was still very bad. There were some of them slaves in 
every sense of the word — mere chattels, which were not 
so valuable as horse or dog. But the fate of others was 
so far mitigated that they could not be sold separate 
from their family — that they could not be sold except 
along with the land \ and at last glimpses appear of a 
sort of rent paid for certain portions of the lord's estate 
in full of all other requirements. But this process had 
again to be gone through when many centuries had 
elapsed, and a new state of society had been fully esta- 
blished, and it will be sufficient to remind you that in the 
fourth century, to which we are now come, the Eoman 
world consisted of a monarchy where all the greatness 
and magnificence of the empire were concentrated on 
the emperor and his court ; that the monarchical system 
was rapidly pervading the Church; and that below 
these two distinct but connected powers there was no 
people, properly so called — the country was oppressed 
and ruined, and the ancient dignity of Borne trans- 
planted to new and foreign quarters, at the sacrifice of 
all its oldest and most elevating associations. The half- 
depopulated city of Romulus and the Kings — of the 
Consuls and Augustus, looked with ill-disguised hatred 
and contempt on the modern rival which denied her the 
name of Capital, and while fresh from the builder's hand, 
robbed her of the name of the Eternal City. We shall 
see great events spring from this jealousy of the two 
towns. In the mean time, we shall finish our view of 
Constantine by recording the greatness of his military 
skill, and merely protest against the enrolment in the 
list of saints of a man who filled his family circle with 
blood — who murdered his wife, his son, and his nephew, 



92 FOURTH CENTURY. 

encouraged the contending factions of the now disputa- 
tious Church— gave a fallacious support to the orthodox 
Athanasius, and died after a superstitious baptism at 
a.d. 337. tlie nands of tn e heretical Arius. An unbiassed 
judgment must pronounce him a great politician, 
who played with both parties as his tools, a Christian 
from expediency and not from conviction. It is a pity 
that the subserviency of the Greek communion has 
placed him in the number of its holy witnesses, for we 
are told by a historian that when the emperor, after the 
dreadful crimes he had perpetrated, applied at the 
heathen shrines for expiatory rites, the priests of the 
false gods had truly answered, "there are no purifica- 
tions for such deeds as these." But nothing could be 
refused to the benefactor of the Church. The great 
ecclesiastical council of this age, (325), consisting of 
three hundred and eighteen bishops, and presided over 
by Constantine in person, gave the Mcene Creed as the 
result of their labours — a creed which is still the symbol 
of Christendom, but which consists more of a condemna- 
tion of the heresies which were then in the ascendant, 
than in the plain enunciation of the Christian faith. A 
layman, we are told, an auditor of the learned debates 
in this great assembly, a man of clear and simple common 
sense, met some of the disputants, and addressed them 
in these words:— "Arguers! Christ and his apostles de- 
livered to us, not the art of disputation, nor empty 
eloquence, but a plain and simple rule which is main- 
tained by faith and good works." The disputants, we 
are further told, were so struck with this undeniable 
truth that they acknowledged their error at once. 

But not yet firm and impregnable were the bulwarks 
of Christianity. While dreaming anchorites in the deserts 
of Thebais were repeating the results of fasting and in- 
sanity as the manifestation of divine favour, the world 



JULIAN THE APOSTATE. 93 

was startled from its security by the appalling 
discovery that the emperor himself, the young 
and vigorous Julian, was a follower of the old philoso- 
phers, and a worshipper of the ancient gods. And a 
dangerous antagonist he was, even independent of his 
temporal power. Kis personal character was irre- 
proachable, his learning and talent beyond dispute, and 
his eloquence and dialectic skill sharpened and improved 
by an education in Athens itself. Less than forty years 
had elapsed since Constantine pronounced the sentence 
of banishment on the heathen deities. It was not pos- 
sible that the Christian truth was in every instance 
received where the old falsehood was driven away. 
We may therefore conclude, without the aid of historic 
evidence, that there must have been innumerable dis- 
tricts — villages in far-off valleys, hidden places up among 
the hills — where the name of Christ had not yet pene- 
trated, and all that was known was, that the shrine of 
the local gods was overthrown, and the priests of the old 
ceremonial proscribed. When we remember that the 
heathen worship entered into almost all the changes of 
the social and family life — that its sanction was necessary 
at the wedding — that its auguries were indispensable at 
births — that it crowned the statue of the household god 
with flowers — that it kept alive the fire upon the altar of 
the emperor — and that it was the guardian of the tombs 
of the departed, as it had been the principal consola- 
tion during the funeral rites, — we shall perceive that, 
irrespective of absolute faith in his system of belief, the 
cessation of the priest's office must have been a serious 
calamity. The heathen establishment had been enriched 
by the piety or ostentation of many generations. There 
must have been still alive many who had been turned 
out of their comfortable temples, many who viewed the 
assumption of Christianity into the State as a political 



94 FOURTH CENTURY. 

engine to strengthen the tyranny under which the 
nations groaned. We may see that self-interest and 
patriotism may easily have been combined in the effort 
made by the old faith to regain the supremacy it had 
lost. The Emperor Julian endeavoured to lift up the 
fallen gods. He persecuted the Christians, not with 
fire and sword, but with contempt. He scorned and 
tolerated. He preached moderation, self-denial, and 
purity of life, and practised all these virtues to an 
extent unknown upon a throne, and even then unusual 
in a bishop's palace. 

How these Christian graces, giving a charm and 
dignity to the apostate emperor, must have received a 
still higher authority from the painful contrast they 
presented to the agitated condition and corrupted morals 
of the Christian Church ! Everywhere there was war 
and treachery, and ambition and unbelief. Half the 
great sees were held by Arians, who raved against the 
orthodox; and the other half were held by Athanasius 
and his followers, who accused their adversaries of bein«- 
" more cruel than the Scythians, and more irreconcilable 
than tigers." At Eome itself there was an orthodox 
bishop and an Arian rival. It is not surprising that 
Julian, disgusted with the scenes presented to him by 
the mutual rage of the Christian sects, thought the 
surest method of restoring unity to the empire would 
be to silence all the contending parties and reintroduce 
the peaceful pageantries of the old Pantheon. If some 
of the fanciful annotators of the new faith had allego- 
rized the facts of Christianity till they ceased to be 
facts at all, Julian performed the same office for the 
heathen gods. Jupiter and the rest were embodiments 
of the hidden powers of nature. Yulcan was the per- 
sonification of human skill, and Yenus the beautiful re- 
presentative of connubial affection. But men's minds 



PAGANISM RESTORED. 95 

were now too sharpened with the contact they had had 
with the real to be satisfied with such fallacies as these. 
Eloquent teachers arose, who separated the eternal 
truths of revelation from the accessories with which 
they were temporarily combined. Ridicule was retorted 
on the emperor, who had sneered at the Christian ser- 
vices. Who, indeed, who had caught the slightest view 
of the spirituality of Christ's kingdom, could abstain 
from laughing at the laborious heathenism of the master 
of the world ? He cut the wood for sacrifice, he slew 
the goat or bull, and, falling down on his knees, puffed 
with distended cheeks the sacred fire. He - marched to 
the temple of Yenus between two rows of dissolute and 
drunken worshippers, striving in vain by face and atti- 
tude to repress the shouts of riotous exultation and the 
jeers of the spectators. Then, wherever he went he 
was surrounded by pythonesses, and augurs, and fortune- 
tellers, magicians who could work miracles, and necro- 
mancers who could raise the dead. When he restored a 
statue to its ancient niche, he was rewarded by a shake 
of its head ; when he hung up a picture of Thetis or 
Amphitrite, she winked in sign of satisfaction. Where 
miracles are not believed, the performance of them is 
fatal. But his expenditure of money in honouring the 
gods was more real, and had clearer results. He nearly 
exhausted the empire by the number of beasts he slew. 
He sent enormous offerings to the shrines of Dodona, 
and Delos, and Delphi. He rebuilt the temples, which 
time or Christian hatred had destroyed; and, by way 
of giving life to his new polity, he condescended to 
imitate the sect he despised, in its form of worship, in 
its advocacy of charity, peace, and good will, and in its 
institutions of celibacy and retirement, which, indeed, 
had been a portion of heathen virtue before it was ad- 
mitted into the Christian Church. But his affected con- 



9G FOURTH CENTURY. 

tempt soon degenerated into persecution. He would 
have no soldiers who did not serve his gods. Many re- 
signed their swords. He called the Christians "Gali- 
leans/' and robbed them of their property and despite- 
fully used them, to try the sincerity of their faith. 
" Does not your law command you/ 7 he said, " to sub- 
mit to injury, and to renounce your worldly goods? 
Well, I take possession of your riches that your march 
to heaven may be unencumbered." All moderation 
was now thrown off on both sides. Kesistance was 
made by the Christians, and extermination threatened 
by the emperor. In the midst of these contentions he 
was called eastward to resist the aggression of Sapor, the 
Persian king. An arrow stretched Julian on his couch. 
He called round him his chief philosophers and priests. 
With them, in imitation of Socrates, he entered into 
a.d. 363. dee P discussions about the soul. Nothing more 
heroic than his end, or more eloquent than his 
parting discourse. But death did not soften the ani- 
mosity of his foes. The Christians boasted that the 
arrow was sent by an angel, that visions had foretold 
the persecutor's fall, and that so would perish all the 
enemies of God. The adherents of the emperor in 
return blamed the Galileans as his assassins, and boldly 
pointed to Athanasius, the leader of the Christians, as the 
culprit. Athanasius would certainly not have scrupled 
to rid the world of such an Agag and Holofernes, but it 
is more probable that the death occurred without either 
a miracle or a murder. The successors of Julian were 
enemies of the apostate. They speedily restored their 
fellow-believers to the supremacy they had lost. A 
ferocious hymn of exultation by Gregory of Nazianzen 
was chanted far and wide. Cries of joy and execration 
resounded in market-places, and churches, and theatres. 
The market-places had been closed against the Chris- 



GOTHS. 97 

tians, their churches had been interdicted, and the 
theatres shut up, by the overstrained asceticism of the 
deceased. It was perceived that Christianity had taken 
deeper root than the apostate had believed, and hence- 
forth no effort could be made to revivify the old super- 
stition. After a nominal election of Jovian, the choice 
of the soldiers fell on two of their favourite leaders, 
Yalentinian and Yalens, brothers, and sufferers in the 
late persecutions for their faith. Named emperors of 
the Eoman world, they came to an amicable division of 
the empire into East and West. Yalens remained in 
Constantinople to guard the frontiers of the Danube and 
the Euphrates; while Yalentinian, who saw great clouds 
darkening over Italy and Gaul, fixed his imperial resi- 
dence in the strong city of Milan. The separation took 
place in 364, and henceforth the stream of history 
flows in two distinct and gradually diverging channels. 
This century has already been marked by the removal 
of the seat of power to Constantinople ; by the attempt 
at the restoration of Paganism by Julian; and we have 
now to dwell for a little on the third and greatest in- 
cident of all, the invasion of the Goths, and final settle- 
ment of hostile warriors on the Eoman soil. 

Names that have retained their sound and established 
themselves as household words in Europe now meet us 
at every turn. Yalentinian is engaged in resisting the 
Saxons. The Britons, the Scots, the Germans, are 
pushing their claims to independence ; and in the farther 
East, the persecutions and tyranny of the contemptible 
Yalens are suddenly suspended by the news that a people 
hitherto unheard of had made their appearance within 
an easy march of the boundary, and that universal terror 
had taken possession of the soldiers of the empire. Who 
were those soldiers ? We have seen for many years that 
the policy of the emperors had been to introduce the bar- 



98 FOURTH CENTURY. 

barians into the military service of the State, and to 
expose the wasted and helpless inhabitants to the ra- 
pacity of their tax-gatherers. This system had been 
carried to such a pitch, that it is probable there were 
none but mercenaries of the most varying interests in 
the Eoman ranks. Yet such is the effect of discipline, 
and the pride of military combination, that all other 
feelings gave way before it. The Gothic chief, now in- 
vested with command in the Eoman armies, turned his 
arms against his countrymen. The Albanian, the Saxon, 
the Briton, elevated to the rank of duke or count, looked 
back on Marius and Cassar as their lineal predecessors 
in opposing and conquering the enemies of Rome. The 
names of the generals and magistrates, accordingly, 
which we encounter after this date, have a strangely 
barbaric sound. There are Ricimer, and Marcomir, and 
Arbogast — and finally, the name which overtopped and 
outlived them all, the name of Alaric the Goth. Now, 
the Goths, we have seen, had been settled for many 
generations on the northern side of the Danube. Much 
intercourse must have taken place between the in- 
habitants of the two banks. There must have been 
trade, and love, and quarrellings, and rejoicings. At 
shorter and shorter intervals the bravest of the tribes 
must have passed over into the Roman territory and 
joined the Legions. Occasionally a timid or despotic 
emperor would suddenly order his armies across, and 
carry fire and sword into the unsuspecting country. 
But on the whole, the terms on which they lived were 
not hostile, for the ties which united the two peoples 
were numerous and strong. Even the languages in the 
course of time must have come to be mutually intelligi- 
ble, and we read of Gothic leaders who were excellent 
judges of Homer and seldom travelled without a few 
chosen books. This being the case, what was the con- 



HUNS. 99 

sternation of the almost civilized Goths in the fertile 
levels of the present Wallachia and Moldavia to hear 
that an innumerable horde of dreadful savages, calling 
themselves Huns and Magyars, had appeared on the 
western shore of the Black Sea, and spread over the 
land, destroying, murdering, burning whatever lay in 
their way ! Cooped up for an unknown period, it ap- 
peared, on the northeastern side of the Palus Moeotis,now 
better known to us as the Sea of Azof — living on fish 
out of the Don, and on the cattle of the long steppes 
which extend across the Yolga, these sons of the Scy- 
thian desert had never been heard of either by the 
Goths or Eomans. A hideous people to behold, as the 
perverted imagination of poet or painter could produce. 
They were low in stature, but broad-shouldered and 
strong. Their wide cheek-bones and small eyes gave 
them a savage and cruel expression, which was increased 
by their want of nose, for the only visible appearance 
\of that indispensable organ consisted of two holes sunk 
into the square expanse of their faces. Fear is not a 
flattering painter, but from these rude descriptions it is 
easy to recognise the Calmuck countenance ; and when 
we add their small horses, long spears, and prodigious 
lightness and activity, we shall see a very close re- 
semblance between them and their successors in the 
same district, the Eussian Cossacks of the Don. On, on, 
came the torrent of these pitiless, fearless, ugly, dirty, 
irresistible foes. The Goths, terrified at their aspect, 
and bewildered with the accounts they heard of their 
numbers and mode of warfare, petitioned the emperor 
to give them an asylum on the Roman side. Their 
prayer was granted on condition of depositing their 
children and arms in Roman hands. They had no time 
to squabble about terms. Every thing was agreed to. 
Boats manned by Roman soldiers were busy day and 



100 FOURTH CENTURY. 

night in transporting the Gothic exiles to the Roman 
side. Arms and jewels, and wives and children, the 
furniture of their tents, and idols of their gods, all got 
safely across the guarding river. The Huns, the Alans, 
and the other unsightly hordes who had gathered in the 
pursuit, came down to the bank, and shouted useless 
defiance and threats of vengeance. The broad Danu.be 
rolled between; and there rested that night on the 
Roman soil a whole nation, different in interest, in 
manners and religion, from the population they had 
joined, numbering upwards of a million souls, bound 
together by every thing that constitutes the unity of a 
people. The avarice and injustice of the Roman author- 
ities negatived the clause of the agreement that stipu- 
lated for the surrender of the Gothic arms. To redeem 
their swords and spears, they parted with the silver and 
gold they had amassed in their predatory incursions on 
the Roman territory. They knew that once in posses- 
sion of their weapons they could soon reclaim all they 
gave — and in no long time the attempt was made. Fri- 
tigern, the leader of their name, led them against the 
armies of Rome. Insulted at their audacity, the Em- 
peror Yalens, at the head of three hundred thousand 
men, met them in the plain of Adrianople. The exist- 
ence of the Gothic people was at stake. They 
fought with desperation and hatred. The em- 
peror was defeated, leaving two-thirds of his army on 
the field of battle. Seeking safety in a cottage at the 
side of the road, he was burned by the inexorable pur- 
suers, who, gathering up their broken lines, marched 
steadily through the intervening levels and gazed with 
enraptured eyes on the glittering towers and pinnacles 
of Constantinople itself. But the walls were high and 
strongly armed. The barbarians were inveigled into a 
negotiation, and mastered by the unequal powers of lying, 



HUNS. 101 

at all times characteristic of the Greeks. Fritigern con- 
sented to withdraw his troops : some were embodied in 
the levies of the empire, and others dispersed in different 
provinces. Those settled in Thrace were faithful to their 
employers, and resisted their ancient enemies the Huns ; 
but the great body of the discontented conquerors were 
ready for fresh assaults on the Eoman land. Theodo- 
sius, called to the throne in 379, succeeded in staving 
off the evil day; but when the final partition of the 
empire took place between his two sons — Honorius and 
an . Arcadius — there was nothing to oppose the 

a.d. 394. & ri 

terrible onset of the Goths. At their head was 
Alaric, the descendant of their original chiefs, and him- 
self the bravest of his warriors. He broke into Greece, 
forcing his way through Thermopylae, and devastated 
the native seats of poetry and the arts with fire and 
sword. The ruler at Constantinople heard of his ad- 
vance with terror, and opposed to him the Yandal Stili- 
cho, the greatest of his generals. But the wily Alaric 
declined to fight, and out-manoeuvred his enemies, es- 
caping to the sure fastnesses of Epirus, and sat down 
sullen and discontented, meditating further expeditions 
into richer plains, and already seeing before him the 
prostrate cities of Italy. The terror of Arcadius tried 
in vain to soften his rage, or satisfy his ambition with 
vain titles, among others, that of Count of the Illyrian 
Border. The spirit of aggression was fairly roused. All 
the Gothic settlers in the Eoman territory were ready to 
join their countrymen in one great and combined attack; 
— and with this position of the personages of the drama, 
the curtain falls on the fourth century, while prepara- 
tions for the great catastrophe are going on. 



FIFTH CENTURY. 



ISmperorg. 



A.D. Weat: 

Honorius — (cont.) 
424. Valentinian III. 
455. Petronius Maximus. 
455. Avitus. 
457. Majorianus. 
461. Severus. 
467. Anthemius. 

472. Olibius. 

473. GrLYCERIUS. 

474. Julius Nepos. 

475. Augustulus Romulus. 



a.d. East. 

Arcadius — (cont.) 

408. Theodosius II. 

450. Marcian. 

457. Leo the Great. 

474. Zeno. 

491. Anastasius. 



King of tfje dftante 



481. Clovis. 



»ng of Itm< 

489. Theodoric. 



authors, 

Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine, Pelagius, (405,) Sidonius 
Apollinaris, Patricius, Macrobius, Vicentius of Lerins, (died 
450,) Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, (412-444.) 



THE FIFTH CENTURY. 

END OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE — FORMATION OF MODERN 
STATES GROWTH OF ECCLESIASTICAL AUTHORITY. 

We find the same actors on the stage when the cur- 
tain rises again, but circumstances have greatly changed. 
After his escape from Stilicho, Alaric had been " lifted 
on the shield/' the wild and picturesque way in which 
the warlike Goths nominated their kings, and henceforth 
was considered the monarch of a separate and inde- 
pendent people, no longer the mere leader of a band of 
predatory barbarians. In this new character he entered 
into treaties with the emperors of Constantinople or 
Rome, and broke them, as if he had already been the 
sovereign of a civilized state. 

In 403 he broke up from his secure retreat on the 
Adriatic, and burst into Italy, spreading fire and famine 
wherever he went. Honorius, the Emperor of the West, 
fled from Milan, and was besieged in Asti by the Goths. 
Here would have ended the imperial dynasty, some 
years before its time, if it had not been for the watchful 
Stilicho. This Vandal chief flew to the rescue of Hono- 
rius, repulsed Alaric with great slaughter, and delivered 
his master from his dangerous position. The grateful 
emperor entered Eome in triumph, and for the last time 
the Circus streamed with the blood of beasts and men. 
He retired after this display to the inaccessible marshes 
of Eavenna, at the mouths of the Po, and, secure in 
that fortress, sent an order to have his preserver and 

105 



106 



FIFTH CENTURY. 



Jn _ benefactor murdered; Stilicho, the only hope of 

A.D. 408. ' 7 J ■ t 

Eome, was assassinated, and Alaric once more 
saw all Italy within his grasp. It was not only the 
Goths who followed Alaric's command. All the bar- 
barians, of whatever name or race, who had been trans- 
planted either as slaves or soldiers — Alans, Franks, and 
Germans — rallied round the advancing king, for the im- 
politic Honorius had issued an order for the extermina- 
tion of all the tribes. There were Eritons, and Saxons, 
and Suabians. It was an insurrection of all the manly 
elements of society against the indescribable deprava- 
tion of the inhabitants of the Peninsula. The wildest 
barbarian blushed in the midst of his ignorance and 
rudeness to hear of the manners of the highest and 
most distinguished families in Eome. Nobody could 
hold out a hand to avert the judgment that was about 
to fall on the devoted city. Ambassadors indeed ap- 
peared, and bought a short delay at the price of many 
thousand pounds' weight of gold and silver, and of large 
quantities of silk • but these were only additional incite- 
ments to the cupidity of the invader. Tribe after tribe 
rose up with fresh fury; warriors of every hue and 
shape, and with every manner of equipment. The 
handsome Goth in his iron cuirass ; the Alan with his 
saddle covered with human skin ; the German making a 
hideous sound by shrieking on the sharp edge of his 
shield ; and the countryman of Alaric himself sounding 
the "horn of battle," which terrified the Eomans with 
its ominous note — all started forward on the march. At 
the head of each detachment rode a band, singing songs 
of exultation and defiance; and the Eomans, stupefied 
with fear, saw these innumerable swarms defile towards 
the Milvian bridge and close up every access to the 
town. There was no corn from Sicily or Africa; a pest 
raged in every house, and hunger reduced the inhabit- 



FALL OF ROME. 107 

ants to despair. The gates were thrown open, and all 
the pent-up animosity of the desert was poured out upon 
the mistress and corrupter of the world. For six days 
the city was given up to remorseless slaughter and uni- 
versal pillage. The wealth was incalculable. The cap- 
tives were sold as slaves. The palaces were overthrown, 
and the river choked with carcasses and the treasures 
of art which the barbarians could not appreciate. " The 
new Babylon/' cries Bossuet, the great Bishop of Meaux, 
" rival of the old, swelled out like her with her successes, 
and, triumphing in her pleasures and riches, encountered 
as great a fall." And no man lamented her fate. 

Alaric, who had thus achieved a victory denied to 
l„„ Hannibal and Pyrrhus, resolved to push his con- 

A.D. 410. J ; L 

quests to the end of Italy. But on his march 
towards the Straits of Sicily, illness overtook him. His 
life had been unlike that of other men, and his burial 
was to excite the wonder of the Bruttians, among 
whom he died. A large river was turned from its 
course, and in its channel a deep grave was dug and 
ornamented with monumental stone. To this the body 
of the barbaric king was carried, clothed in full armour, 
and accompanied with some of the richest spoils of 
Borne ) and then the stream was turned on again , the 
prisoners who had executed the works were slaughtered 
to conceal the secret of the tomb, and nobody has ever 
found out where the Gothic king reposes. But while 
the Busentino flowed peaceably on, and guarded the 
body of the conqueror from the revenge of the Bomans, 
new perils were gathering round the throne of the 
Western emperor. As if the duration of the empire had 
been inseparably connected with the capital, the reve- 
rence of mankind was never bestowed on Milan or Ba- 
venna, in which the court was now established, as it 
had been upon Borne. Britain had already thrown off 



108 



FIFTH CENTURY. 



the distant yoke, arid submitted to the Saxon invaders. 
Spain had also peaceably accepted the rule of the three 
kindred tribes of Sueves and Alans and Yandals. Gaul 
itself had given its adhesion to the Burgundians (who 
fixed their seat in the district which still bears their 
name) and offered a feeble resistance to any fresh in- 
vader. Ataulf, the brother of Alaric, came to the res- 
cue of the empire, and of course completed the destruc- 
tion. He married the sister of Honorius, and retained 
her as a hostage of the emperor's good faith. He pro- 
mised to restore the revolted provinces to their former 
master, and succeeded in overthrowing some competitors 
who had started up to dispute with Eavenna the wrecks 
of former power. He then forced his way into Spain, 
and the hopes of the degenerate Romans were high. 
But murder, as usual, stopped the career of Ataulf, and 
all was changed. The emperor ratified the possessions 
which he could not dispute, and in the first 

A.D. 415. n i ' 

twenty years ot this century three separate 
kingdoms were established in Europe. This was soon 
followed by a Yandal conquest of the shores of Africa, 
which raised Carthage once more to commercial import- 
ance, united Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia to the new- 
founded state, and by the creation of a fleet gained the 
command of the Mediterranean Sea, and threatened 
Constantinople itself. 

"With so many provinces not only torn from the 
empire, but erected into hostile kingdoms, nothing was 
wanting but some new irruption into the still dependent 
territories to put a final end to the Eoman name. And 
a new incursion came. In the very involved relations 
existing between the emperors of the East and West, it 
is difficult to follow the course of events with any clear- 
ness. While the deluded populace of Constantinople 
were rejoicing in the fall of their Italian rival, they 



ATTILA. 100 

heard with amazement, in 441, that a savage potentate, 
who had pitched his tents in the plains of Pannonia and 
Thrace, and kept round him, for defence or conquest, 
seven hundred thousand of those hideous-featured Huns 
who had spread devastation and terror all over the 
populations of Asia, from the borders of China to the 
Don, had determined on stretching his conquests over 
the whole world, and merely hesitated with which of 
the doomed empires to begin his career. His name was 
Attila, or, according to its native pronunciation, Etzel ; 
and it soon resounded, louder and more terrifying than 
that of Alaric the Goth. The Emperor of the East sent 
an embassy to this dreadful neighbour, a minute account 
of which remains, and from which we learn the barbaric 
pomp and ceremony of the leader of the Huns, and the 
perfidy and debasement of the Greeks. An attempt 
was made to poison the redoubtable chief, and he com- 
plained of the' guilty ambassador to the very person 
who had given him his instructions for the deed. Un- 
satisfied with the result, the Hunnish monarch advanced 
his camp. Constantinople, anxious to ward off the blow 
from itself, descanted to the savage king on the exposed 
condition and ill-defended wealth of the Italian towns. 
Treachery of another kind came to his aid. An offended 
sister of the emperor sent to Attila her ring as a mark 
of espousal, and he now claimed a portion of the empire 
as the dowry of his bride. When this was refused, he 
reiterated his old claim of satisfaction for the attempt 
upon his life, and ravaged the fields of Eelgium and 
Gaul, in the double character of avenger of an insult 
and claimant of an inheritance. It does not much 
matter under what plea a barbarous chieftain, with six 
hundred thousand warriors, makes a demand. It must 
be answered sword in hand, or on the knees. The 
newly-established Frankish and Burgundian kings 

10 



HO FIFTH CENTURY. 

gathered their forces in defence of their Christian faith 
and their recently-acquired dominions. Attila retired 
from Orleans, of which he had commenced the siege, 
and chose for the battle-field, which was to decide the 
destiny of the world, a vast plain not far from Chalons, 
on the Marne, where his cavalry would have room to 
act, and waited the assault of all the forces that France 
and Italy could collect. The Yisigoths prepared for the 
decisive engagement under their king, Theodoric; the 
Franks of the Saal under Meroveg; the Eipuarian 
■ : Franks, the Saxons, and the Burgundians were 

A.D. 451. ' ' -r 

under leaders of their own. It was a fight in 
which were brought face to face the two conquering 
races of the world, and upon its result it depended 
whether Europe was to be ruled by a dynasty of Cal- 
mucks or left to her free progress under her Gothic and 
Teutonic kings. Three hundred thousand corpses 
marked the severity of the struggle, but victory rested 
with the West. Attila retreated from Gaul, and wreaked 
his vengeance on the Italian cities. He destroyed Aqui- 
leia, whose terrified inhabitants hid themselves in the 
marshes and lagoons which afterwards bore the palaces 
of Venice ; Yicenza, Padua, and Yerona were spoiled 
and burned. Pavia and Milan submitted without re- 
sistance. On approaching Eome, the venerable bishop, 
Saint Leo, met the devastating Hun, and by the gravity 
of his appearance, the ransom he offered, and perhaps 
the mystic dignity which still rested upon the city whose 
cause he pleaded, prevailed on him to retire. Shortly 
after, the chief of this brief and terrible visitation died 
in his tent on the banks of the Danube, and left no 
lasting memorial of his irruption except the depopula- 
tion his cruelt}^ had caused, and the ruin he had spread 
over some of the fairest regions of the earth. 

But Rome, spared by the influence of the bishop from 



THE VANDALS. HI 

the ravage of the Huns, could not escape the destroying 
enmity of Genseric and the Yandals. Dashing across 
from Africa, these furious conquerors destroyed for de- 
struction's sake, and affixed the name of Vandalism on 
whatever is harsh, and unrefined. For fourteen days the 
spoilers were at work in Eome, and it is only wonderful 
that after so many plunderings any thing worth plunder- 
ing remained. When the sated Yandals crossed to Car- 
thage again, the Gothic and Suevic kings gave the 
purple to whatever puppet they chose. Afraid still to in- 
vest themselves with the insignia of the Imperial power, 
they bestowed them or took them away, and at last 
rendered the throne and the crown so contemptible, 
that when Odoacer was proclaimed King of Italy, the 
phantom assembly which still called itself the "Roman 
Senate sent back to Constantinople the tiara and purple 
robe, in sign that the Western Empire had passed away. 
Zeno, the Eastern ruler, retained the ornaments of the 
departed sovereignty, and sent to the Herulean Odoacer 
the title of " Patrician," sole emblem left of the greatness 
and antiquity of the Roman name. It may be interest- 
ing to remember that the last who wore the Imperial 
crown was a youth who would probably have escaped 
the recognition of posterity altogether, if he had not, 
by a sort of cruel mockery of his misfortunes, borne 
the names of Romulus Augustulus — the former recalling 
the great founder of the city, and the latter the first of 
the Imperial line. 

Thus, then, in 476, Home came to her deserved and 
terrible end; and before we trace the influence of this 
great event upon the succeeding centuries, it will be 
worth while to devote a few words to the cause of its 
overthrow. These were evidently three — the ineradi- 
cable barbarity and selfishness of the Eoman character, 
the depravation of manners in the capital, and the want 



112 FIFTH CENTURY. 

of some combining influence to bind all the parts of the 
various empire into a whole. From the earliest inci- 
dents in the history of Eome, we gather that she was 
utterly regardless of human life or suffering. Her treat- 
ment of her vanquished enemies, and her laws upon 
parental authority, upon slaves and debtors, show the 
pitiless disposition of her people. Look at her citizens 
at any period of her career — her populace or her con- 
suls — in the field of battle or in the forum, you will 
always find them the true descendants of those blood- 
stained refugees, who established their den of robbers 
on the seven hills, and pretended they were led by a 
man who had been suckled by a wolf. While conquest 
was their object, this sanguinary disposition enabled 
them to perform great exploits ; but when victory had 
secured to them the blessings of peace and safety, the 
same thirst for excitement continued. They cried out 
for blood in the amphitheatre, and had no pleasure in 
any display which was not accompanied with pain. The 
rival chief who had perilled their supremacy in the field 
was led in ferocious triumph at the wheel of his con- 
queror, and beheaded or flogged to death at the gate of 
the Capitol. The wounded gladiator looked round the 
benches of the arena in hopes of seeing the thumbs of 
the spectators turned down — the signal for his life being 
spared; but matrons and maids, the high and the low, 
looked with unmoved faces upon his agonies, and gave 
the signal for his death without remorse. They were 
the same people, even in their amusements, who gave 
order for the destruction of Numantium and Carthage. 
But cruelty was not enough. They sank into the 
wildest vices of sensuality, and lost the dignity of man- 
hood, and the last feelings of self-resj^ect. Never was a 
nation so easily habituated to slavery. They licked the 
hand that struck them hardest. They hung garlands 



HARSHNESS OF THE ROMANS. 113 

for a long time on the tomb of Nero. They insisted on 
being revenged on the murderers of Commodus, and 
frequently slew more citizens in broils in the street and 
quarrels in the theatre, than had fought at Cannae or 
Zama. It might have been hoped that the cruelty 
which characterized the days of their military aggres- 
sion would be softened down when they had become 
the acknowledged rulers of the world. Luxury itself, 
it might be thought, would be inconsistent with the 
sight of blood. But in this utterly detestable race the 
two extremes of human society seemed to have the 
same result. The brutal, half-clothed savage of an early 
age conveyed his tastes as well as his conquests to the 
enervated voluptuary of the empire. The virtues, such 
as they were, of that former period — contempt of dan- 
ger, unfaltering resolution, and a certain simplicity of 
life — had departed, and all the bad features were exagge- 
rated. Eeligion also had disappeared. Even a false 
religion, if sincerely entertained, is a bond of union 
among all who profess its faith. But between Rome 
and its colonies, and between man and man, there was 
soon no community of belief. The sweltering wretches 
in the Forum sneered at the existence of Bacchus in 
the midst of his mysteries, and imitated the actions of 
their gods, while they laughed at the hypocrisy of 
priests and augurs, who treated them as divine. A 
cruel, depraved, godless people — these were the Eomans 
who had enslaved the world with their arms and cor- 
rupted it with their civilization. When their capital 
fell, men felt relieved from a burden and shame. The 
lessons of Christianity had been thrown away on a 
population too gross and too truculent to receive them. 
Some of gentler mould than others had received the 
Saviour; but to the mass of Eomans the language of 
peace and justice, of forgiveness and brotherhood, was 
H 10* 



114 FIFTH CENTURY. 

unknown. It was to be the worthier recipients of a 
pure and elevating faith, that the Goth was called from 
his wilderness and the German from his forest. 

But the faith had to be purified itself before it was 
fitted for the reception of the new conquerors of the 
world. The dissensions of the Christian Churches had 
added only a fresh element of weakness to the empire 
of Rome. There were heretics everywhere, supporting 
their opinions with bigotry and violence — Arians, Sabel- 
lians, Montanists, and fifty names besides. Torn by 
these parties, dishonoured by pretended conversions, the 
result of flattery and ambition, the Christian Church 
was further weakened by the effect of wealth and 
luxury upon its chiefs. While contending with rival 
sects upon some point of discipline or doctrine, they 
made themselves so notorious for the desire of riches, 
and the infamous arts they practised to get themselves 
appointed heirs of the rich members of their congrega- 
tions, that a law was passed making a conveyance in 
favour of a priest invalid. And it is not from Pagan 
enemies or heretical rivals we learn this — it is from the 
letters still extant of the most honoured Fathers of the 
Church. One of them tells us that the Prefect Pre- 
textatus, alluding to the luxury of the Pontiffs, and to 
the magnificence of their apparel, said to Pope Damasus, 
"Make me Bishop of Eome, and I will turn Christian." 
"Far, then," says a Eoman Catholic historian of our 
own day, " from strengthening the Eoman world with 
its virtues, the Christian society seemed to have adopted 
the vices it was its office to overcome." But the fall of 
Eoman power was the resurrection of Christianity. It 
had a Besurrcction, because it had had a Death, and a 
new world was now prepared for its reception. Its 
everlasting truths, indeed, had been full of life and 
vigour all through the sad period of Eoman deprava- 



MONKS. 115 

tion, but the ground was unfitted for their growth ; and 
the great characteristic of this century is not the con- 
quest of Koine by Alaric the Goth, or the dreadful 
assault on Europe by Attila the Hun, or the final aboli- 
tion of the old capital of the world by Odoacer the 
Herulean, but rather the ecclesiastical chaos which 
spread over the earth. The age of martyrs had passed 
— the philosophers had begun their pestiferous tamper- 
ings with the facts of revelation — and over all rioted 
and stormed an ambitious and worldly priesthood, who 
hated their opponents with more bitterness than the 
heathens had displayed against the Christians, and ran 
wild in every species of lawlessness and vice. The 
deserts and caves which used to give retreat to medita- 
tive worshippers or timid believers, now teemed with 
thousands of furious and fanatical monks, who rushed 
occasionally into the great cities of the empire, and filled 
their streets with blood and rapine. Guided by no less 
fanatical bishops, they spread murder and terror over 
whole provinces. Alexandria stood in more fear of 
these professed recluses than of an army of hostile 
soldiers. "There is a race," says Eunapius, "called 
monks — men indeed in form, but hogs in life, who prac- 
tise and allow abominable things. "Whoever wears a 
black robe, and is not ashamed of filthy garments, and 
presents a dirty face to the public view, obtains a tyran- 
nical authority." False miracles, absurd prophecies, 
and ludicrous visions were the instruments with which 
these and other impostors established their power. Mad 
enthusiasts imprisoned themselves in dungeons, or ex- 
posed themselves on the tops of pillars, naked, except 
by the growth of their tangled hair, and the coating of 
filth upon their persons, — and gained credit among the 
ignorant for self-denial and abnegation of the world. 
All the high offices of the Church were so lucra- 



116 FIFTH CENTURY. 

tive and honourable as to be the object of universal 
desire. 

To be established archbishop of a diocese cost more 
lives than the conquest of a province. "When the Chris- 
tian community needed support from without, they had 
recourse to some rich or powerful individual, some 
general of an army, or governor of a district, and begged 
him to assume the pastoral staff in exchange for his 
military sword. Sometimes the assembled crowd cried 
out the name of a favourite who was not even known 
to be a Christian, and the mitre was conveyed by accla- 
mation to a person who had to undergo- the ceremonies 
of baptism and ordination before he could place it on 
his head. Sometimes the exigencies of the congrega- 
tion required a scholar or an orator for its head. It 
applied to a philosopher to undertake its direction. He 
objected that his philosophy had been declared incon- 
sistent with the Christian faith, and his mode of life con- 
trary to Christian precept. They forgave him his philo- 
sophy, his horses and hounds, his wife and children, 
and constituted him their chief. Age was of no conse- 
quence. A youth of eighteen has been saluted bishop 
by a cry which seemed to the multitude the direct inspi- 
ration of Heaven, and seated in the chair of his dignity 
almost without his knowledge. Once established on his 
episcopal seat, he had no superier. The Roman Bishop 
had not yet asserted his supremacy over the Church. 
Each prelate was sovereign Pontiff of his own see, and 
his doctrines for a long time regulated the doctrines of 
his flock. Under former bishops, Milan had been Arian, 
under Ambrose it was orthodox, and with a change of 
master might have been Arian again. The emperors had 
occasionally interfered with their authoritative decisions, 
but generally the dispute was left in divided dioceses 
to be settled by argument, when the rivals' tempers 



PERSECUTION. U7 

allowed such a mode of warfare, but more frequently 
by armed bands of the retainers of the resj>ective creeds, 
and sometimes by an appeal to miracles. But with this 
century a new spirit of bitterness was let loose upon 
the Church. Councils were held; at which the doctrines 
of the minority were declared dangerous to the State, 
and the civil power was invoked to carry the sentence 
into effect. In Africa, where the great name of Augustin 
of Hippo admitted no opposition, the Donatists, though 
represented by no less than two hundred and seventy- 
nine prelates, were condemned as heretics, and given 
over to the persecuting sword. But in other quarters 
the dissidents looked for support to the civil power, when 
it happened to be of their opinion in Church affairs. 
Borne chose Clovis, the politic and energetic Frank, for 
its guardian and protector, and the Arians threw them- 
selves in the same way on the support of the Yisigoths 
and Burgundians. A difference of faith became a pre- 
text for war. Clovis, who envied his neighbours their 
territories south of the Loire, led an expedition against 
them, crying, "It is shameful to see those Arians in 
possession of such goodly lands !" and everywhere a vast 
activity was perceptible in the Church, because its 
interests were now connected with those of kings and 
peoples. In earlier times, discussions were carried on 
on a great variety of doctrines which, though widely 
spread, were not yet authoritatively declared to be 
articles of faith. St. Jerome himself, and others, had 
had to defend their opinions against the attacks of 
various adversaries, who, without ceasing to be consi- 
dered true members of the Church, wrote powerfully 
against the worship of martyrs and their relics; against 
the miracles professedly wrought at their tombs ; against 
fasting, austerities, and celibacy. ]STo appeal was made 
on those occasions either to the Bishop of Rome as 



118 FIFTH CENTUKY. 

head of the Church, or to the emperor as head of the 
State. Now, however, the spirit of moderation was 
banished, and the decrees of councils were considered 
superior to private or even diocesan judgment. Life 
and freedom of discussion were at an end under an 
enforced and rigid uniformity. But the struggle lasted 
through the century. It was the period of great con- 
vulsions in the State, and disputations, wranglings, and 
struggle in the Church. How these, in a State tortured 
by perpetual change, and a Church filled with energy 
and fire, acted upon each other, may easily be supposed. 
The doubtful and unsteady civil government had sub- 
ordinated itself to the turbulent ardour of the perplexed 
but highly-animated Church. After the conquest of 
Borne, where was the barbaric conqueror to look for 
any guide to internal unity, or any relic of the vanished 
empire by which to connect himself with the past ? 
There was only the Church, which was now not only 
the professed teacher of obedience, peace, and holiness, 
but the only undestroyed institution of the State. The 
old population of Rome had been wasted by the sword, 
and famine, and deportation. The emperors of the West 
had left the scene; the Roman Senate was no more. 
There was but one authority which had any influence 
on the wretched crowd who had returned to their 
ancient capital, or sought refuge in its ruined palaces or 
oTass-grown streets from the pursuit of their foes; and 
that was the Bishop of the Christian congregation— 
whose palace had been given to him by Constantine— 
who claimed already the inheritance of St. Peter— and 
who carried to the new government either the support 
of a willing people, or the enmity of a seditious mob. 

A new hero came upon the scene in the per- 
A,I) " 489 ' son of Theodoric, the Ostrogoth. Odoacer tried 
in vain to resist the two hundred thousand warriors of 



THEODORIC. 119 

this tribe who poured upon Italy in 490, and, after a 
long resistance in Ravenna, yielded the kingdom of 
Italy to his rival. Theodoric, though an Arian, culti- 
vated the good opinion of the orthodox, and gained the 
favour of the Roman Bishop. He had almost a super- 
stitious veneration for the dignities of ancient Rome. 
He treated with respect an assembly which called itself 
the Senate, but did not allow his love of antiquity to 
blind him to the degeneracy of the present race. He 
interdicted arms to all men of Roman blood, and tried 
in vain to prevent his followers from using the appel- 
lation "Roman" as their bitterest form of contempt. 
Lands were distributed to his followers, and they occu- 
pied and improved a full third of Italy. Equal laws 
were provided for both populations, but he forbade the 
toga and the schools to his countrymen, and left the 
studies and refinements of life, and offices of civil dignity, 
to the native race. The hand that holds the pen, he 
said, becomes unfitted for the sword. But, barbarian 
as he was called, he restored the prosperity which the 
fairest region of the earth had lost under the emperors. 
Bridges, aqueducts, theatres, baths, were repaired; 
palaces and churches built. Agriculture was encouraged, 
attempts were made to drain the Pontine Marshes; iron- 
mines were worked in Dalmatia, and gold-mines in Brut- 
tium. Large fleets protected the coasts of the Mediter- 
ranean from pirates and invaders. Population increased, 
taxes were diminished ; and a ruler who could neither 
read nor write attracted to his court all the learned men 
of his time. Already the energy of a new and enter- 
prising people was felt to the extremities of his domi- 
nions. A new race, also, was established in Gaul. Klod- 
wig, leader of the Franks, received baptism at the hands 
of St. Remi in 496, and began the great line of French 
rulers, who, passing his name through the softened 



120 FIFTH CENTURY. 

sound of Clovis, presented, in the different families who 
succeeded him, eighteen kings of the name of Louis, as 
if commemorative of the founder of the monarchy. 

In England the petty kingdoms of the Heptarchy 
were in the course of formation, and though, when 
viewed closely, we seemed a divided and even hostile 
collection of individual tribes, the historian combines 
the separate elements, and tells us that, before the fifth 
century expired, another branch of the barbarians had 
settled into form and order, and that the Anglo-Saxon 
race had taken possession of its place. 

With these newly-founded States rising with fresh 
vigour from among the decayed and festering remains 
of an older society, we look hopefully forward to what 
the future years will show us. 



SIXTH CENTURY. 



Mn%$ of tfje dFranfcg. 3Bmpercrs of tfje IBast* 

A.D. A.D. 

Clovis. — (cow£.) Anastasius. — (eont.) 

511. Childebert, Thierry, Clo- 518. Justin. 

TAIRE, ClODOMIR. cri _ T x 

527. Justinian I. 

559. Clotaire (sole king). r ._ _ 

565. Justin II. 

562. Charibert, Gontran, Si- „__ _ 

578. Tiberius II. 
gebert and Childeric. 

584. Clotaire II., (of Soissons.) ' AU 

596. Thierry II., Theodobert, 
(of Paris and Austrasia.) 

Eutfjor*. 

Boethius, Procopius, Gildas, Gregory of Tours, Columba, 
(520-597,) Priscian, Columbanus, Benedict, Eyagrius, (Scholas- 
ticus,) Fulgentius, Gregory the Great. 



11 



THE SIXTH CENTUBY. 

BELISARIUS AND NARSES IN ITALY SETTLEMENT OF THE 

LOMBARDS LAWS OF JUSTINIAN BIRTH OF MOHAMMED. 

Theodoric, though not laying claim to universal 
empire in right of his possession of Eome and Italy, 
exercised a sort of supremacy over his contemporaries 
by his wisdom and power. He also strengthened his 
position by family alliances. His wife was sister of 
Klodwig or Clovis, King of the Franks. He married 
his own sister to Hunric, King of the Vandals, his niece 
to the Thuringian king. One of his daughters he gave 
to Sigisniund, King of the Burgundians, and the other 
to Alaric the Second, King of the Yisigoths. Belying 
on the double influence which his relationship and repu- 
tation secured to him, he rebuked or praised the poten- 
tates of Europe as if they had been his children, and 
gave them advice in the various exigencies of their 
affairs, to which they implicitly submitted. He would 
fain have kept alive what was left of the old Boman 
civilization, and heaped honours on the Senator Cassio- 
dorus, one of the last writers of Borne. " We send you 
this man as ambassador," he said to the King of the 
Burgundians, " that your people may no longer pretend 
to be our equals when they perceive what manner of 
men we have among us." But his rule, though gene- 
rous, was strict. He imprisoned the Bishop of Borne 
for disobedience of orders in a commission he had given 
him, and repressed discontent and the quarrels of the 
factions with an unsparing hand. But the death of this 

123 



124 SIXTH CENTURY. 

great and wise sovereign showed on what unstable 
foundations a barbaric power is built. Frightful tra- 
gedies were enacted in his family. His daughter was 
murdered by her nephew, whom she had associated 
with her in the guardianship of her son. But ven- 
geance overtook the wrong-doer, and a strange revolution 
occurred in the history of the world. The emperor 
reigning at Constantinople was the celebrated Justinian. 
He saw into what a confused condition the affairs of the 
new conquerors of Italy had fallen. Eallying round 
him all the recollections of the past — giving command 
of his armies to one of the great men who start up un- 
expectedly in the most hopeless periods of history, 
whose name, Belisarius, still continues to be familiar to 
our ears — and rousing the hostile nationalities to come 
to his aid, he poured into the peninsula an army with 
Roman discipline and the union which community of 
interests affords. In a remarkably short space 
of time, Belisarius achieved the conquest of 
Italy. The opposing soldiers threw down their arms 
at sight of the well-remembered eagles. The nations 
threw off the supremacy of the Ostrogoths. Belisarius 
had already overthrown the kingdom of the Yandals 
and restored Africa to the empire of the East. He took 
ISTaples, and put the inhabitants to the sword. He ad- 
vanced upon Rome, which the Goths deserted at his 
approach. The walls of the great city were restored, 
and a victory over the fugitives at Perugia seemed to 
secure the whole land to its ancient masters. But 
Witig, the Ostrogoth, gathered courage from despair. 
He besought assistance from the Franks, who had now 
taken possession of Burgundy ; and volunteers from all 
quarters nocked to his standard, for he had promised 
them the spoils of Milan. Milan was immensely rich, 
and had espoused the orthodox faith. The assailants 



TOTILA. 125 

were Arians, and intent on plunder. Such destruction 
had scarcely been seen since the memorable slaughter of 
the Huns at Chalons on the Marne. The Ostrogoths and 
Burgundian Franks broke into the town, and the streets 
were piled up with the corpses of all the inhabitants. 
There were three hundred thousand put to death, and 
multitudes had died of famine and disease. The ferocity 
was useless, and Belisarius was already on the march ; 
Witig was conquered, in open fight, while he was busy 
besieging Eome ; Eavenna itself, his capital, was taken, 
and the Ostrogothic king was led in triumph along the 
streets of Constantinople. 

But the conqueror of the Ostrogoths fell into disfavour 
■„ at court. He was summoned home, and a great 

A.D. 540. . . & . 

man, whom his presence in Italy had kept in 
check, availed himself of his absence. Totila seemed 
indeed worthy to succeed to the empire of his country- 
man Theodoric. He again peopled the utterly ex- 
hausted Eome; he restored its buildings, and lived 
among the new-comers himself, encouraging their efforts 
to give it once more the appearance of the capital of the 
world. But these efforts were in vain. There was no 
possibility of reviving the old fiction of the identity of 
the freshly-imported inhabitants and the countrymen of 
Scipio and Csesar. Only one link was possible between 
the old state of things and the new. It was strange 
that it was left for the Christian Bishop to bridge over 
the chasm that separated the Eome of the Consulship 
and the Empire from the capital of the Goths. Yet so 
it was. While the short duration of the reigns of the 
barbaric kings prevented the most sanguine from look- 
ing forward to the stability of any power for the future, 
the immunity already granted to the clerical order, and 
the sanctuary afforded, in the midst of the wildest ex- 
cesses of siege and storm, by their shrines and churches, 

11* 



126 SIXTH CENTURY. 

had. affixed a character of inviolability and permanence 
to the influence of the ecclesiastical chief. At Constan- 
tinople, the presence of the sovereign, who affected a 
grandeur to which the pretensions to divinity of the 
Eoman emperors had been modesty and simplicity, kept 
the dignity of the Bishop in a very secondary place. 
But at Eome there was no one left to dispute his rank. 
His office claimed a duration of upwards of four hundred 
years; and though at first his predecessors had been 
fugitives and martyrs, and even now his power had no 
foundation except in the willing obedience of the mem- 
bers of his flock, the necessity of his position had forced 
him to extend his claims beyond the mere requirements 
of his spiritual rule. During the ephemeral occupations 
of the city by Yandals and Huns and Ostrogoths, and 
all the tribes who successively took possession of the 
great capital, he had been recognised as the representa- 
tive of the most influential portion of the inhabitants. 
As it naturally followed that the higher the rank of a 
ruler or intercessor was, the more likely his success 
would be, the Christians of the orthodox persuasion had 
the wisdom to raise their Bishop as high as they could. 
He had stood between the devoted city and the Huns ; 
he had promised obedience or threatened resistance to 
the Goths, according to the conduct pursued with regard 
to his flock by the conquerors. He had also lent to 
Belisarius all the weight of his authority in restoring 
the power of the emperors, and from this time the 
Bishop of Eome became a great civil as well as eccle- 
siastical officer. All parties in turn united in trying to 
win him over to their cause — the Arian kings, by kind- 
ness and forbearance to his adherents; and the orthodox, 
by increasing the rights and privileges of his see. And 
already the policy of the Eoman Pontiffs began to take 
the path it has never deserted since. They looked out 



END OF THE OSTROGOTHS. 127 

in all quarters for assistance in their schemes of ambition 
and conquest. Emissaries were despatched into many 
nations to convert them, not from heathenism to Chris- 
tianity, but from independence to an acknowledgment 
of their subjection to Rome. It was seen already that 
a great spiritual empire might be founded upon the 
ruins of the old Eoman world, and spread itself over the 
perplexed and unstable politics of the barbaric tribes. 
]STo means, accordingly, were left untried to extend the 
conquests of the spiritual Caesar. When Clovis the 
Frank was converted by the entreaties of his wife from 
Arianism to the creed of the Eoman Church, the ortho- 
dox bishops of France considered it a victory over 
their enemies, though these enemies were their country- 
men and neighbours. And from henceforth we find the 
different confessions of faith to have more influence in 
the setting up or overthrowing of kingdoms than the 
strength of armies or the skill of generals. Parses, 
who was appointed the successor of Belisarius, was a 
believer in the decrees of the Council of Nice. His or- 
thodoxy won him the. support of all the orthodox Huns 
and Heruleans and Lombards, who formed an army of 
infuriated missionaries rather than of soldiers, and 
gained to his cause the majority of the Ostrogoths 
whom it was his task to fight. Totila in vain tried to 
bear up against this invasion. The heretical Ostrogoths, 
expelled from the towns by their orthodox fellow-citizens, 
and ill supported by the inhabitants of the lands they 
traversed, were defeated in several battles ; and at last, 
when the resisting forces were reduced to the paltry 
number of seven thousand men, their spirits broken by 
defeat, and a continuance in Italy made useless by the 
hostile feelings of the population, they applied to ISTarses 
for some means of saving their lives. He furnished them 
with vessels, which carried them from the lands which, 



!28 SIXTH CENTURY. 

sixty years before, had been assigned them by the great 
Theodoric, and they found an obscure termination to so 
strange and checkered a career, by being lost and mingled 
in the crowded populations of Constantinople. This was 
in 553. The Ostrogoths disappear from history. The 
Visigoths have still a settlement at the southwest of France 
and in the rich regions of Spain, but they are isolated by 
their position, and are divided into different branches. 
The Franks are a great and seemingly well-cemented 
race between the Rhine and the sea. The Burgundians 
have a form of government and code of laws which keep 
them distinct and powerful. There are nations rising 
into independence in Germany. In England, Chris- 
tianity has formed a bond which practically gives firm- 
ness and unity to the kingdoms of the Heptarchy ; and 
it might be expected that, having seen so many tribes 
of strange and varying aspect emerge from the unknown 
regions of the East, we should have little to do but 
watch the gradual enlightenment of those various races, 
and see them assuming, by slow degrees, their present 
respective places ; but the undiscovered extremities of 
the earth were again to pour forth a swarm of invaders, 
who plunged Italy back into its old state of barbarism 
and oppression, and established a new people in the 
midst of its already confused and intermixed populations. 
Somewhere up between the Aller and the Oder there 
had been settled, from some unknown period, a people 
of wild and uncultivated habits, who had occasionally 
appeared in small detachments in the various gatherings 
of barbarians who had forced their way into the South. 
Following the irresistible impulse which seems to impel 
all the settlers in the North, they traversed the regions 
already occupied by the Heruleans and the Gepides, and 
paused, as all previous invasions had done, on the outer 
boundary of the Danube. These were the Longobardb 



IRRUPTION OF THE LOMBARDS. 129 

or Lombards, so called from the spears, bardi, with 
which they were armed ; and not long they required to 
wait till a favourable opportunity occurred for them to 
cross the stream. In the hurried levies of JSTarses some 
of them had offered their services, and had been present 
at the victory over Totila the Goth. They returned, in 
all probability, to their companions, and soon the hearts 
of the whole tribe were set upon the conquest of the 
beautiful region their countrymen had seen. If they 
hesitated to undertake so long an expedition, two inci- 
dents occurred which made it indispensable. Flying in 
wild fury and dismay from the face of a pursuing enemy, 
the Avars, themselves a ferocious Asiatic horde which 
had terrified the Eastern Empire, came and joined them- 
selves to the Lombards. With united forces, all their 
tents, and wives and children, their horses and cattle, 
this dreadful alliance began their progress to Italy. The 
other incident was, that in revenge for the injustice of 
his master, and dreading his further malice, Narses him- 
self invited their assistance. Alboin, the Lombard 
king, was chief of the expedition. He had been refused 
the hand of Rosamund, the daughter of Cunimond, 
chief of the Grepides. He poured the combined armies 
of Lombards and Avars upon the unfortunate tribe, 
slew the king with his own hand, and, according to the 
inhuman fashion of his race, formed his drinking-cup 
of his enemy's skull. He married Eosamund, and pur- 
sued his victorious career. He crossed the Julian Alps, 
made himself master of Milan and the dependent terri- 
tories, and was lifted on the shield as King of Italy. At 
a festival in honour of his successes, he forced his 
favourite wine-goblet into the hands of his wife. She 
recognised the fearful vessel, and shuddered while she 
put her lips to the brim. But hatred took possession of 
her heart. She promised her hand and throne to Kil- 
I 



13 SIXTH CENTURY. 

mich, one of her attendants, if he would take vengeance 
on the tyrant who had offered her so intolerable a 
wrong. The attendant was won by the bride, and slew 
Alboin. But justice pursued the murderers. They 
were discovered, and fled to Eavenna, where the Exarch 
held his court. Saved thus from human retribution, 
Eosamund brought her fate upon herself Captivated 
with the prospect of marrying the Exarch, she presented 
a poisoned cup to Kilmich, now become her husband, as 
he came from the bath. The effect was immediate, and 
the agonies he felt told him too surely the author of his 
death. He just lived long enough to stab the wretched 
woman with his dagger, and this frightful domes- 
tic tragedy was brought to a close. 
Alboin had divided his dominion into many little 
states and dukedoms. A kind of anarchy succeeded 
the strong government of the remorseless and clear- 
sighted king, and enemies began to arise in different 
directions. The Franks from the south of France 
began to cross the Alps. The Greek settlements began 
to menace the Lombards from the South. Internal dis- 
union was quelled by the public danger, and Antharis, 
the son of Cleph, was nominated king. To strengthen 
himself against the orthodox Franks, he professed him- 
self a Christian and joined the Arian communion. With 
the aid of his co-religionists he repelled the invaders, 
and had time, in the intervals of their assaults, to ex- 
tend his conquests to the south of the peninsula. There 
he overthrew the settlements which owned the Empire 
of the East j and coming to the extreme end of Italy, 
the savage ruler pushed his war-horse into the water as 
deep as it would go, and, standing up in his stirrups, 
threw forward his javelin with all his strength, saying, 
"That is the boundary of the Lombard power." Un- 
happily for the unity of that distracted land, the war- 



LOMBARD POLITY. 131 

rior's boast was unfounded, and it has continued ever 

since a prey to discord and division. Another kingdom, 

however, was added to the roll of European states ; and 

„„„ this was the last settlement permanently made 

A.D. 591. . L J 

on the old Eoman territory. 
The Lombards were a less civilized horde than any 
of their predecessors. The Ostrogoths had rapidly as- 
similated themselves to the people who surrounded 
them, but the Lombards looked with haughty disdain 
on the population they had subdued. By portioning 
the country among the chiefs of the expedition, they 
commenced the first experiment on a great scale of 
what afterwards expanded into the feudal system. 
There were among them, as among the other northern 
settlers, an elective king and an hereditary nobility, 
owing suit and service to their chief, and exacting the 
same from their dependants ; and already we see the 
working of this similarity of constitution in the diffusion 
throughout the whole of Europe of the monarchical and 
aristocratic principle, which is still the characteristic of 
most of our modern states. From this century some 
authors date the origin of what are called the " Middle 
Ages," forming the great and obscure gulf between 
ancient and modern times. Others, indeed, wish to fix 
the commencement of the Middle Ages at a much 
earlier date — even so far back as the reign of Constan- 
tine. They found this inclination on the fact that to 
him we are indebted for the settlement of barbarians 
within the empire, and the institution of a titled nobility 
dependent on the crown. But many things were needed 
besides these to constitute the state of manners and 
polity which we recognise as those of the Middle Ages, 
and above them all the establishment of the monarchical 
principle in ecclesiastical government, and the recogni- 



132 SIXTH CENTURY. 

tion of a sovereign priest. This was now close at hand, 
and its approach was heralded by many appearances. 

How, indeed, could the Church deprive itself of the 
organization which it saw so powerful and so successful 
in civil affairs ? A machinery was all ready to produce 
an exact copy of the forms of temporal administration. 
There were bishops to be analogous to the great feuda- 
taries of the crown; priests and rectors to represent the 
smaller freeholders dependent on the greater barons; 
but where was the monarch by whom the whole system 
was to be combined and all the links of the great chain 
held together by a point of central union ? The want 
of this had been so felt, that we might naturally have 
expected a claim to universal superiority to have long 
ere this been made by a Pope of Rome, the ancient seat 
of the temporal power. But with his residence per- 
petually a prey to fresh inroads, a heretical king merely 
granting him toleration and protection, the pretension 
would have been too absurd during the troubles of Italy, 
and it was not advanced for several years. The neces- 
sity of the case, however, was such, that a voice was 
heard from another quarter calling for universal obe- 
dience, and this was uttered by the Patriarch of Con- 
stantinople. Rome, we must remember, had by this time 
lost a great portion of her ancient fame. It was re- 
served for this wonderful city to rise again into all her 
former grandeur, by the restoration of learning and the 
knowledge of what she had been. At this period all 
that was known of her by the ignorant barbarians was, 
that she was a fresh-repaired and half-peopled town, 
which had been sacked and ruined five times within a 
century, that her inhabitants were collected from all 
| -Mi-is of the world, and that she was liable to a rcpcti- 
t ; ' of her former misfortunes. They knew nothing 
c> tie great men who had raised her to such pre-eminence. 



GREGORY THE GREAT. 133 

She had sunk even from being the capital of Italy, and 
could therefore make no intelligible claim to be con- 
sidered the capital of the world. Constantinople, on 
the other hand, which, by our system of education, we 
are taught to look upon as a very modern creation 
compared with the Eome of the old heroic ages of the 
kings and consuls, was at that period a magnificent me- 
tropolis, which had been the seat of government for 
three hundred years. The majesty of the Eoman name 
had transferred itself to that new locality, and nothing 
was more natural than that the Patriarch of the city of 
Constantine, which had been imperial from its origin, 
and had never been defiled by the presence of a Pagan 
temple, should claim for himself and his see a pre- 
eminence both in power and holiness. Accordingly, a 
demand was made in 588 for the recognition throughout 
the Christian world of the universal headship of the 
bishopric of Constantinople. But at that time there 
was a bishop of Eome, whom his successors have grate- 
fully dignified with the epithet of Great, who stood up 
in defence, not of his own see only, but of all the bishop- 
rics in Europe. Gregory published, in answer to the 
audacious claim of the Eastern patriarch, a vigorous 
protest, in which these remarkable words occur : — " This 
I declare with confidence, that whoso designates himself 
Universal Priest, or, in the pride of his heart, consents 
to be so named — he is the forerunner of Antichrist." It 
was therefore to Eome, on the broad ground of the 
Christian equality of all the chief pastors of the Church, 
that we owe this solemn declaration against the preten- 
sions of the ambitious John of Constantinople. 

But Constantinople itself was about to fade from the 
minds of men. Dissatisfied with the opposition to its 
supremacy, the Eastern Church became separated in 
interest and discipline and doctrine from its "Western 

12 



134 SIXTH CENTURY. 

branch. The intercourse between the two was hostile, 
and in a short time nearly ceased. The empire also 
was so deeply engaged in defending its boundaries 
against the Persians and other enemies in Asia, that 
it took small heed of the proceedings of its late depend- 
encies, the newly-founded kingdoms in Europe. It 
is probable that the refined and ostentatious court of 
Justinian, divided as it was into fanatical parties about 
some of the deepest and some of the most unimportant 
mysteries of the faith, and contending with equal bitter- 
ness about the charioteers of the amphitheatre accord- 
ing as their colours were green or blue, looked with pro- 
found contempt on the struggles after better govern- 
ment and greater enlightenment of the rabble of Franks, 
and Lombards, and Burgundians, who had settled them- 
selves in the distant lands of the West. The interior 
regulations of Justinian formed a strange contrast with 
the grandeur and success of his foreign policy. By his 
lieutenants Belisarius and Narses, he had reconquered 
the lost inheritance of his predecessors, and held in full 
sovereignty for a while the fertile shores of Africa, 
rescued from the debasing hold of the Yandals; he had 
cleared Italy of Ostrogoths, Spain even had yielded an 
unwilling obedience, and his name was reverenced in 
the great confederacy of the Germanic peoples who 
held the lands from the Atlantic eastward to Hungary, 
and from Marseilles to the mouth of the Elbe. But his 
home was the scene of every weakness and wickedness 
that can disgrace the name of man. Kept in slavish 
submission to his wife, he did not see, what all the rest 
of the world saw, that she was the basest of her sex, 
and a disgrace to the place he gave her. Beginning as 
a dancer at the theatre, she passed through every grade 
of infamy and vice, till the name of Theodora became a 
synonym for every thing vile and shameless. Yet this 



Justinian's law-reform. 135 

man, successful in war and politic in action, though con- 
temptible in private life, had the genius of a legislator, 
and left a memorial of his abilities which extended its 
influence through all the nations which succeeded to 
any portion of the Roman dominion, and has shaped 
and modified the jurisprudence of all succeeding times. 
He was not so much a maker of new laws, as a restorer 
and simplifier of the old; and as the efforts of Justinian 
in this direction were one of the great features by which 
the sixth century is distinguished, it will be useful to 
devote a page or two to explain in what his work con- 
sisted. 

The Eoman laws had become so numerous and so 
contradictory that the administration of justice was 
impossible, even where the judges were upright and 
intelligent. The mere word of an emperor had been 
considered a decree, and legally binding for all future 
time. !No lapse of years seems to have brought a law 
once promulgated into desuetude. The people, there- 
fore, groaned under the uncertainty of the statutes, 
which was further increased by the innumerable glosses 
or interpretations put upon them by the lawyers. All 
the decisions which had ever been given by the fifty-four 
emperors, from Adrian to Justinian, were in full force. 
All the commentaries made upon then! by advocates 
and judges, and all the sentences delivered in accord- 
ance with them, were contained in thousands of volumes; 
and the result was, when Justinian came to the throne 
in 526, that there was no point of law on which any 
man could be sure. He employed the greatest juriscon- 
sults of that time, Trebonian and others, to bring some 
order into the chaos ; and such was the diligence of the 
commissioners, that in fourteen months they produced 
the Justinian Code in twelve books, containing a 
condensation of all previous constitutions. In 



136 



SIXTH CENTURY. 



the course of seven years, two hundred laws and fifty 
judgments were added by the emperor himself, and a 
new edition of the Code was published in 534. Under 
the name of Institutes appeared a new manual for the 

rnn legal students in the great schools of Constanti- 

A.D. 533. to fo 

nople, Bcrytus, and Eome, where the principles 
of Roman law are succinctly laid down. The third of 
his great works was one for the completion of which he 
gave Trebonian and his assessors ten years. It is called 
the Digest or Pandects of Justinian, because in it were 
digested, or put in order in a general collection, the best- 
decisions of the courts, and the opinions and treatises 
of the ablest lawyers. All previous codes were ran- 
sacked, and two thousand volumes of legal argument 
condensed; and in three years the indefatigable law- 
reformers published their work, wherein three million 
leading judgments were reduced to a hundred and fifty 
thousand. Future confusion was guarded against by a 
commandment of the emperor abolishing all previous 
laws and making it penal to add note or comment to 
the collection now completed. The sentences delivered 
by the emperor, after the appearance of the Pandects, 
were published under the name of the Novella}; and 
with this great clearing-out of the Augean stable of 
ancient law, the salutary labours of Trebonian came to 
a close. In those laws are to be seen both the virtues 
and the vices of their origin. They sprang from the 
wise liberality of a despot, and handle the rights of sub- 
jects, in their relation to each other, with the equani- 
mity and justice of a power immeasurably raised above 
them all. But the unlimited supremacy of the ruler is 
maintained as the sole foundation for the laws them- 
selves. So we see in these collections, and in the spirit 
which they have spread over all the codes which have 
taken them for their model, a combination of humanity 



MOHAMMED. 1S 7 

and probity in the civil law, with a tendency to exalt 
to a ridiculous excess the authority of the govorning 
power. 

This has been a century of wonderful revolutions. 
We have seen the kingdom of the Ostrogoths take the 
lead in Europe under the wise government of Theodoric 
the Great. We have seen it overthrown by an army of 
very small size, consisting of the very forces they had 
so recently triumphed over in every battle ; and finally, 
after the victories over them of Belisarius and JSTarses, 
we have seen the last small remnant of their name re- 
moved from Italy altogether and eradicated from his- 
tory for all future time. But, strange as this reassertion 
of the Greek supremacy was, the rapidity of its over- 
throw was stranger still. A new people came upon the 
stage, and established the Lombard power. The empire 
contracted itself within its former narrow bounds, and 
kept up the phantom of its superiority merely by the 
residence of an Exarch, or provincial governor, at 
Ravenna. The fiction of its power was further main- 
tained by the Emperor's official recognition of certain 
rulers, and his ratification of the election of the Homan 
bishops. But in all essentials the influence had departed 
from Constantinople, and the Western monarchies were 
separated from the East. 

In the Northwest, the confederacy of the Franks, 
which had consolidated into one immense and powerful 
kingdom under Clovis, became separated, weakened, 
and converted into open enemies under his degenerate 
successors. 

But as the century drew to a close, a circumstance 
occurred, far away from the scene of all these proceed- 
ings, which had a greater influence on human affairs 
than the reconquest of Italy or the establishment of 
France. This was the marriage of a young man in a 

12* 



138 SIXTH CENTURY. 

town of Arabia with the widow of his former master. 
In 564 this young man was born in Mecca, where his 
family had long held the high office of custodiers and 
guardians of the famous Caaba, which was popularly 
believed to bo the stone that covered the grave of 
Abraham. But when he was still a child his father 
died, and he was left to the care of his uncle. The 
simplicity of the Arab character is shown in the way in 
which the young noble was brought up. Abu Taleb 
initiated him in the science of war and the mysteries of 
commerce. He managed his horse and sword like an 
accomplished cavalier, and followed the caravan as a 
merchant through the desert. Gifted with a high poeti- 
cal temperament, and soaring above the grovelling 
superstitions of the people surrounding him, he used 
to retire to meditate on the great questions of man's 
relation to his Maker, which the inquiring mind can 
never avoid. Meditation led to excitement. He saw 
visions and dreamed dreams. He saw great things 
before him, if he could become the leader and lawgiver 
of his race. But he was poor and unknown. His mis- 
tress Cadijah saw the aspirations of her noble servant, 
and offered him her hand. He was now at leisure to 
mature the schemes of national regeneration and re- 
ligious improvement which had occupied him so long, 
and devoted himself more than ever to study and con- 
templation. This was Mohammed, the Prophet of 
Islam, who retired in 594 to perfect his scheme, and 
whose empire, before many years elapsed, extended from 
India to Spain, and menaced Christianity and Europe 
at the same time from the Pyrenees and the Danube. 



SEVENTH CENTURY. 



Min$$ of tf)e dFranfts- lEmperors of tfje ISast. 

A.T). A.D. 

Thierry II. and Theodo Maurice — [cord.) 

bert II. — (cont.) 602. Phocas. 

614. Clotaire III. (sole king.) 611. Heraclius. 

628. Dagobert and Chari- 641. Constantine, (and 
bert. others.) 

638. Sigebert and Clovis II. 642. Constans. 

654. Childeric II. 668. Constantius V. 

679. Thierry IV. 685. Justinian II. 

692. Clovis III. (Pepin, 695. Leontius. 

Mayor.) 697. Tiberius. 

695. Ciiildebert III. (do.) 



&Utf)Ot0. 

Nennius, (620,) Bede, (674-735,) Aldhelm, Adamnanus. 



THE SEVENTH CENTUEY. 

POWER OF ROME SUPPORTED BY THE MONKS CONQUESTS 

OF THE MOHAMMEDANS. 

This, then, is the century during which Mohammed- 
anism and Christianity were marshalling their forces 
— unknown, indeed, to each other, but preparing, accord- 
ing to their respective powers, for the period when they 
were to be brought face to face. We shall go eastward, 
and follow the triumphant march of the warriors of the 
Crescent from Arabia to the shores of Africa ; but first 
we shall cast a desponding eye on the condition and 
prospects of the kingdoms of the West. Conquest, 
spoliation, and insecurity had done their work. Wave 
after wave had passed over the surface of the old Eoman 
State, and obliterated almost all the landmarks of the 
ancient time. The towns, to be sure, still remained, but 
stripped of their old magnificence, and thinly peopled by 
the dispossessed inhabitants of the soil, who congre- 
gated together for mutual support. Trade was carried 
on, but subject to the exactions, and sometimes the 
open robberies, of the avaricious chieftains who had 
reared their fortresses on the neighbouring heights. 
Large tracts of country lay waste and desolate, or were 
left to the happy fertility of nature in the growth of 
spontaneous woods. Marshes were formed over whole 
districts, and the cattle picked up an uncertain exist- 
ence by browsing over great expanses of poor and un- 
enclosed land. These flocks and herds were guarded by 
hordes of armed serfs, who camped beside them on the 

141 



142 



SEVENTH CENTURY. 



fields, and led a life not unlike that of their remote 
ancestors on the steppes of Tartary. A man's wealth 
was counted by his retainers, and there was no supreme 
authority to keep the dignitaries, even of the same 
tribe, from warring on each other and wasting their 
rival's country with fire and sword. Agriculture, there- 
fore, was in the lowest state, and famines, plagues, and 
other concomitants of want were common in all parts 
of Europe. One beautiful exception must be made to 
this universal neglect of agriculture, in favour of the 
Benedictine monks, established in various parts of Italy 
and Gaul in the course of the preceding century. Ke- 
ligious reverence was a surer safeguard to those lowly 
men than castles or armour could have been. jNo 
marauder dared to trespass on lands which were under 
the protection of priest and bishop. And these Western 
recluses, far from imitating the slothful uselessness of 
the Eastern monks, turned their whole attention to the 
cultivation of the soil. In this they bestowed a double 
benefit on their fellow-men, for, in addition to the posi- 
tive improvement of the land, they rescued labour from 
the opprobrium into which it had fallen, and raised it to 
the dignity of a religious duty. Slavery, we have seen, 
was universally practised in all the conquered territories, 
and as only the slaves were compelled to the drudgeries 
of the field, the work itself borrowed a large portion of 
the degradation of the unhappy beings condemned to 
it j and robbery, pillage, murder, and every crime, were 
considered far less derogatory to the dignity of free 
Frank or Burgundian than the slightest touch of the 
mattock or spade. How surprised, then, were the 
haughty countrymen and descendants of Clovis or 
A.lboin to see the revered hands from which they be- 
lieved the highest blessings of Heaven to flow, employed 
in the daily labour of digging, planting, sowing, reaping, 



AGRICULTURE. 1^3 

thrashing, grinding, and baking ! At first they looked 
incredulously on. Even the monks were disposed to 
consider it no part of their conventual duties. But the 
founder of their institution wrote to them, " to beware 
of idleness, as the greatest enemy of the soul," and not 
to be uneasy if at any time the cares of the harvest 
hindered them from their formal readings and regulated 
prayers. "No person is ever more usefully employed 
than when working w T ith his hands or following the 
plough, providing food for the use of man." And the 
effects of these exhortations were rapidly seen. Wher- 
ever a monastery was placed, there were soon fertile 
fields all round it, and innumerable stacks of corn. Gene- 
rally chosen with a view to agricultural pursuits, we 
find sites of abbeys at the present day which are the 
perfect ideal of a working farm ; for long after the out- 
burst of agricultural energy had expired among the 
monks of St. Benedict, the choice of situation and know- 
ledge of different soils descended to the other ecclesias- 
tical establishments, and skill in agriculture continued 
at all times a characteristic of the religious orders. What 
could be more enchanting than the position of their 
monastic homes ? Placed on the bank of some beautiful 
river, surrounded on all sides by the low flat lands en- 
riched by the neighbouring waters, and protected by 
swelling hills where cattle are easily fed, we are too 
much in the habit of attributing the selection of so 
admirable a situation to the selfishness of the portly 
abbot. When the traveller has admired the graces of 
Melrose or of Tintern — the description applies equally 
to almost all the foundations of an early date — and has 
paid due attention to the chasteness of the architecture, 
and beauty of " the long-resounding aisle and fretted 
vault," he sometimes contemplates with a sneer the 
matchless charm of the scenery, and exceeding richness 



144 SEVENTH CENTURY. 

of the haugh or strath in which the building stands. 
"Ah," he says, "they were knowing old gentlemen, 
those monks and priors. They had fish in the river, fat 
beeves upon the meadow, red-deer on the hill, ripe corn 
on the water-side, a full grange at Christmas, and snowy 
sheep at midsummer." And so they had, and deserved 
them all. The head of that great establishment was 
not wallowing in the fat of the land to the exclusion of 
envious baron or starving churl. He was, in fact, set- 
ting them an example which it would have been wise 
in them to follow. He merely chose the situation most 
fitted for his purpose, and bestowed his care on the 
lands which most readily yielded him his reward. It 
was not necessary for the monks in those days to seek 
out some neglected corner, and to restore it to cultiva- 
tion, as an exercise of their ingenuity and strength. 
They were free to choose from one end of Europe to the 
other, for the whole of it lay useless and comparatively 
barren. But when these able-bodied recluses, if such 
they may be called, had shown the results of patient 
industry and skill, the peasants, who had seen their 
labours, or occasionally been employed to assist them, 
were able to convey to their lay proprietors or masters 
the lessons they had received. And at last something 
venerable was thought to reside in the act of farming 
itself. It was so uniformly found an accompaniment of 
the priestly character, that it acquired a portion of its 
sanctity, and the rude Lombard or half-civilized Frank 
looked with a kind of awe upon waving corn and rich 
clover, as if they were the result of a higher intelli- 
gence and purer life than he possessed. Even the 
highest officers in the Church were expected to attend 
to these agricultural conquests. In this century we 
find, that when kings summoned bishops to a council, or 
an archbishop called his brethren to a conference, care 



ADVANTAGES OF THE CHURCH. 145 

was taken to fix the time of meeting at a season which 
did not interfere with the labours of the farm. Privi- 
leges naturally followed these beneficial labours. The 
kings, in their wondering gratitude, surrounded the 
monasteries with fresh defences against the envy or 
enmity of the neighbouring chiefs. Their lands became 
places of sanctuary, as the altar of the Church had been. 
Freedmen — that is, persons manumitted from slavery, 
but not yet endowed with property — were everywhere 
put under the protection of the clergy. Immunities 
were heaped upon them, and methods found out of 
making them a separate and superior race. At the 
Council of Paris, in 613, it was decreed that the priest 
who offended against the common law should be tried 
by a mixed court of priests and laymen. But soon this 
law, apparently so just, was not considered enough, and 
the trial of ecclesiastics was given over to the eccle- 
siastical tribunals, without the admixture of the civil 
element. Other advantages followed from time to time. 
The Church was found in all the kingdoms to be so use- 
ful as the introducer of agriculture, and the preserver 
of what learning had survived the Eoman overthrow, 
that the ambitious hierarchy profited by the royal and 
popular favour. They were the most influential, or per- 
haps it would be more just to say they were the only, 
order in the State. There was a nobility, but it was 
jarring and disunited; there were citizens, but they 
were powerless and depressed; there was a king, but he 
was but the first of the peers, and stood in dignified isola- 
tion where he was 'not subordinate to a combination of 
the others. The clergy, therefore, had no enemy or 
rival to dread, for they had all the constituents of 
power which the other portions of the population wanted. 
Their property was more secure; their lands were 
better cultivated; they were exempt from many of 
K 13 



146 SEVENTH CENTURY. 

the dangers and burdens to which the lay barons were 
exposed; they were not liable to the risks and losses of 
private war; they had more intelligence than their 
neighbours, and could summon assistance, either in 
advice, or support, or money, from the farthest ex- 
tremity of Europe. Nothing, indeed, added more, at 
the commencement of this century, to the authority of 
those great ecclesiastical chieftains, than the circum- 
stance that their interests were supported, not only by 
their neighbouring brethren, but by mitred abbot and 
lordly bishop in distant lands. If a prior or his monks 
found themselves ill used on the banks of the Seine, 
their cause was taken up by all other monks and priors 
wherever they were placed. And the rapidity of their 
intercommunication was extraordinary. Each monas- 
tery seems to have had a number of active young 
brethren who traversed the wildest regions with letters 
or messages, and brought back replies, almost with the 
speed and regularity of an established post. A convent 
on Lebanon was informed in a very short time of what 
had happened in Provence — the letter from the Western 
abbot was read and deliberated on, and an answer in- 
trusted to the messenger, who again travelled over the 
immense tract lying between, receiving hospitality at 
the different religious establishments that occurred upon 
his way, and everywhere treated with the kindness of a 
brother. Monasteries in this way became the centres 
of news as well as of learning, and for many hundred 
years the only people who knew any thing of the state 
of feeling in foreign nations, or had a glimpse of the 
mutual interests of distant kingdoms, were the cowled 
and gowned individuals who were supposed to have 
given up the world and to be totally immersed in pen- 
ances and prayers. What could Hereweg of the strong 
hand do against a bishop or abbot, who could tell at any 



CORRUPTION. 147 

hour what were the political designs of conquerors or 
kiiio-s in countries which the astonished warrior did not 
know even by name; who retained by traditionary 
transmission the politeness of manner and elegance of 
accomplishment which had characterized the best period 
of the Roman power, when Christianized noblemen, on 
being promoted to an episcopal see, had retained the 
delicacies of their former life, and wrote love-songs as 
graceful as those of Catullus, and epigrams neither so 
witty nor so coarse as those of Martial ? Intelligence 
asserted its superiority over brute force, and in this cen- 
tury the supremacy of the Church received its accom- 
plishment in spite of the depravation of its principles. 
It gained in power and sank in morals. A hundred 
years of its beneficial action had made it so popular and 
so powerful that it fell into temptations, from which 
poverty or unpopularity would have kept it free. The 
sixth century was the period of its silent services, its 
lower officers endearing themselves by useful labour, and 
its dignitaries distinguishing themselves by learning and 
zeal. In the seventh century the fruit of all those virtues 
was to be gathered by very different hands. Ambitious 
contests began between the different orders composing 
the gradually rising hierarchy, from the monk in his 
cell to the Bishop of Rome or Constantinople on their 
pontifical thrones. It is very sad, after the view we 
have taken of the early benefits bestowed on many 
nations by the labours and example of the priests and 
monks, to see in the period we have reached the total 
cessation of life and energy in the Church j — of life and 
energy, we ought to say, in the fulfilment of its duties ; 
for there was no want of those qualities in the gratifica- 
tion of its ambition. Forgetful of what Gregory had 
pronounced the chief sign of Antichrist, when he op- 
posed the pretension of his rival metropolitan to call 



1'18 SEVENTH CENTURY. 

himself Universal Bishop, the Bishops of Eome were 
deterred by no considerations of humility or religion 
from establishing their temporal power. Up to this 
time they had humbly received the ratification of their 
election from the Emperors of the East, whose subjects 
they still remained. But the seat of their empire was 
far off, their power was a tradition of the past, and 
great thoughts came into the hearts of the spiritual 
chiefs, of inroads on the territory of the temporal rulers. 
In this design they looked round for supporters and 
allies, and with a still more watchful eye on the quarters 
from which opposition was to be feared. The bishops as 
a body had fallen not only into contempt but hatred. 
One century had sufficed to extinguish the elegant 
scholarship I have mentioned, at one time characteristic 
of the Christian prelates. Ignorance had become the 
badge of all the governors of the Church — ignorance 
and debauchery, and a tyrannical oppression of their 
inferiors. The wise old man in Home saw what advan- 
tage he might derive from this, and took the monks 
under his peculiar protection, relieved them from the 
supervision of the local bishop, and made them imme- 
diately dependent on himself. By this one stroke he 
gained the unflinching support of the most influential 
body in Europe. Wherever they went they held forth 
the Pope as the first of earthly powers, and began 
already, in the enthusiasm of their gratitude, to speak 
of him as something more than mortal. To this the 
illiterate preachers and prelates had nothing to reply. 
They were sunk cither in the grossest darkness, or in- 
volved in the wildest schemes of ambition, bishoprics 
being even held by laymen, and by both priest and lay- 
men used as instruments of advancement and wealth. 
From these the Pontiff on the Tiber, whose weaknesses 
and vices were unknown, and who was held up for 



GRANTS OF LAND. 149 

invidious contrast with the bishops of their acquaintance 
by the libellous and grateful monks, had nothing to 
fear. He looked to another quarter in the political sky, 
and perceived with satisfaction that the kingly office also 
had fallen into contempt. Having lost the first impulse 
which carried it triumphantly over the dismembered 
Eoman world, and made it a tower of strength in the 
hands of warriors like Theodoric the Goth and Clovis the 
Frank, it had forfeited its influence altogether in the pitiful 
keeping of the bloodthirsty or do-nothing kings who had 
submitted to the tutelage of the Mayors of the Palace. 

One of the great supports of the royal influence was 
the fiction of the law by which all lands were supposed 
to hold of the Crown. As in ancient days, in the Ger- 
man or Scythian deserts, the ambitious chieftain had 
presented his favourite with spear or war-horse in token 
of approval, so in the early days of the conquest of 
Gaul, the leader had presented his followers with tracts 
of land. The war-horse, under the old arrangement, 
died, and the spear became rotten; but the land was 
subject neither to death nor decay. What, then, was to 
become of the warrior's holding when he died? On this 
question, apparently so personal to the barbaric chiefs 
of the time of Dagobert of Gaul, depended the whole 
course of European history. The kings claimed the 
power of re-entering on the lands in case of the demise 
of the proprietor, or even in case of his rebellion or dis- 
obedience. The Leud, as he was called — or feudatory, 
as he would have been named at a later time — disputed 
this, and contended for the perpetuity and inalienability 
of the gift. It is easy to perceive who were the winners 
in this momentous struggle. From the success of the 
leuds arose the feudal system, with limited monarchies 
and national nobilities. The success of the kings would 
have resulted in despotic thrones and enslaved popula- 

13* 



150 SEVENTH CENTURY. 

tions. Foremost in the struggle for the royal supremacy 
had been the famous and unprincipled Brunehild, a 
woman more resembling the unnatural creation of a 
romance than a real character. She had succeeded at 
one time in subordinating the leuds, by exterminating 
the recusants with remorseless cruelty ; and her triumph 
might have been final and irrevocable if she had not 
had the bad luck or impolitic hardihood to offend the 
Church. The Abbot Columba, a holy man from the far- 
distant island of Iona in the Hebrides of Scotland, had 
ventured to upbraid her with her crimes. She banished 
him from the Abbey of Luxeuil with circumstances of 
peculiar harshness, and there was no hope for her more. 
The leuds she might have overcome singly, for they 
were disunited and scattered j but now there was not a 
monastery in Europe which did not side with her foes. 
Clotaire, her grandson, marched against her at the in- 
stigation of priests and leuds combined. She was con- 
quered and taken. She was tortured for three days 
with all the ingenuity of hatred, and on the fourth was 
tied to the tails of four wild horses and torn to pieces, 
though the mother, sister, daughter, of kings, and now 
more than eighty years of age. And this brings us to 
the institution and use of the strange officers we have 
already named Mayors of the Palace. 

To aid them in their efforts against the royal assump- 
tions, the leuds long ago had elected one of themselves 
to be domestic adviser of the king, and also to command 
the armies in war. This soon became the recognised 
right of the Mayor of the Palace ; and as in that state 
of society the wars were nearly perpetual, and bearers 
of arms the only wieldcrs of power, the person invested 
with the command was in reality the supreme authority 
in the State. When the king happened to be feeble 
either in body or mind, the mayor supplied his place, 



POPULAR GOVERNMENTS. 151 

without even the appearance of inferiority; and when 
Dagobert, the last active member of the Merovingian 
family, died in 638, his successors were merely the 
nominal holders of the Crown. A new race rose into 
importance, and it will not be very long before we meet 
the hereditary Mayors of the Palace as hereditary 
Kings of the Franks. Here, then, was the whole of 
Europe heaving with some inevitable change. It will 
be interesting to look at the position of its different 
parts before they settled into their new relations. The 
constitutions of the various kingdoms were very nearly 
alike at this time. There were popular assemblies in 
every nation. In France they were called the " Fields 
of May" or of " March," in England the " Wittenage- 
mot," in Spain the " Council of Toledo." These meet- 
ings consisted of the freemen and landholders and bishops. 
But it was soon found inconvenient for the freemen and 
smaller proprietors to attend, in consequence of the 
length of the journey and the miserable condition of the 
roads ; and the nobles and bishops were the sole persons 
who represented the State. The nobles held a parallel 
rank to each other in all countries, though called by 
different names. In France, a person in possession of 
any office connected with the court, or of lands pre- 
sented by the Crown, was called a leud or entrustion, 
a count or companion, or vassal. In England he was 
called a royal thane. The lower order of freemen were 
called herimans, or inferior thanes; in Latin liberi, or 
more simply, boni homines, good men. Below these were 
the Romans, or old inhabitants of the country; below 
these, the serfs or bondmen attached to the soil ; and far 
down, below them all, out of all hope, or consideration, 
the slaves, who were the mere chattels of their lords. 
This, then, was the constitution of European society 
when the Arabian conquests began — at the head of the 



152 SEVENTH CENTURY* 

nation the King, at the head of the people the Church ; 
the nobles followed according to their birth or power; 
the freemen, whether citizens engaged in the first infant 
struggles of trade, or occupying a farm, came next ; and 
the wretched catalogue was ended by the despoiled 
serf, from whom every thing, even his property in him- 
self, had been taken away. There were laws for the 
protection or restraint of each of these orders, and we 
may gather an idea of the ranks they held in public 
estimation by the following table of the price of blood : — 

Sols. 
For the murder of a freeman, companion, or leud of the king, 

killed in his palace by an armed band 1800 

A duke — among the Bavarians, a bishop 960 

A relation of a duke 640 

The king's leud, a count, a priest, a judge 600 

A deacon 500 

A freeman, of the Salians or Ripuarians 200 

A freeman, of the other tribes 160 

The slave — a good workman in gold 100 

The man of middle station, a colon, or good workman in silver... 100 

The freedman 80 

The slave, if a barbarian — that is, of the conquering tribe 55 

The slave, a workman in iron 50 

The serf of the Church or the king 45 

The swineherd 30 

The slave, among the Bavarians 20 

Distinctions of dress pointed out still more clearly the 
difference of rank and station. The principal variety, 
however, was the method of wearing the hair. The 
chieftain among the Franks considered the length and 
profusion of his locks as the mark of his superiority. 
His broad flowing tresses were divided up the middle 
of his head, and floated over his shoulders. They were 
curled and oiled — not with common butter, like some 
other nations, says an author quoted by Chateaubriand ; 
not twisted in little plaits, like those of the Goths, but 



DIFFERENCES OF RANK. 153 

carefully combed out to their full luxuriance. The 
common soldier, on the other hand, wore his hair long 
in front, but trimmed close behind. They swore by 
their hair as the most sacred of their oaths, and offered 
a tress to the Church on returning from a successful 
war. From this peculiar consideration given to the 
hair arose the custom, still prevalent, of shaving the 
heads of ecclesiastics. They were the serfs of God, and 
sacrificed their locks in token that they were no longer 
free. When a chief was dishonoured, when a king was 
degraded, when a rival was to be rendered incapable of 
opposition, he was not, as in barbarous countries, put to 
death : he was merely made bald. No amount of popu- 
larity, no degree of right, could rouse the people in sup- 
port of a person whose head was bare. When his hair 
grew again, he might again become formidable ; but the 
scissors were always at hand. A tyrannical king clipped 
his enemies' hair, instead of taking off their heads. 
They were condemned to the barber instead of the exe- 
cutioner, and sometimes thought the punishment more 
severe. The sons of Clothilde sent an emissary to her, 
bearing in his hand a sword and a pair of scissors. 
" O queen," he said, " your sons, our masters, wish to 
know whether you will have your grandchildren slain 
or clipped." The queen paused for a moment, and then 
said, " If my grandchildren are doomed not to mount 
the throne, I would rather have them dead than hair- 
less." 

Distinguished thus from the lower orders, the nobility 
soon found that their interests differed from those of the 
Church. The Church placed itself at the head of the de- 
mocracy in opposition to the overweening pretensions 
of the chiefs. It opened its ranks to the conquered 
races, and invested even the converted serf with digni- 
ties which placed him above the level of Thane or 



154 SEVENTH CENTURY. 

Count. The head of the Western Church, now by- 
general consent recognised in the Bishop of Rome, was 
not slow to see the advantage of his position as leader 
of a combination in favour of the million. The doctrine 
of the equality of all men in the sight of Heaven was 
easily commuted into a demand of universal submission 
to the Holy See ; and so wide was the range given to 
this claim to obedience that it embraced the proudest 

of the nobles and haughtiest of kings. It was a Satis- 
fy o 

faction to the slave in his dungeon to hear that the 
great man in his castle had been forced to do homage to 
the Church. There was one earthly power to which 
the oppressed could look up with the certainty of sup- 
port. It was this intimate persuasion in the minds of 
the people which gave such undying vigour to the 
counsels and pretensions of the ecclesiastical power. It 
w T as a power sprung from the people, and exercised for 
the benefit of the people. The Popes themselves were 
generally selected from the lowest rank. But what did 
it matter to the man who led the masses of the trampled 
nations, and stood as a shield between them and their 
tyrants, whether he claimed relationship with emperors 
or slaves ? What did it matter, on the other hand, to 
those hoping and trusting multitudes, whether the object 
of their confidence was personally a miracle of goodness 
and virtue, or a monster of sin and cruelty? It was his 
office to trample on the necks of kings and nobles, and 
bid the captive go free. While he continued true to the 
people, the people were true to him. Monarehs who 
governed mighty nations, and dukes who ruled in pro- 
vinces the size of kingdoms, looked on with surprise at 
the growth of a power supported apparently by no 
worldly arms, but which penetrated to them through 
their courts and armies. There was no great mind to 
guide the opposition to its claims. The bishops were 



THE IRISH CHURCH. 



155 



sunk in ignorance and sloth, and had lost the respect of 
their countrymen. The populations everywhere were 
divided. The succession to the throne was uncertain. 
The Franks, the leading nation, were never for any 
length of time under one head. Neustria, or the 
"Western State, comprising all the land between the 
Meuse, the Loire, and the Mediterranean, Austrasia, or 
the Eastern State, comprising the land between the 
Rhine, the Meuse, and the Moselle, and Burgundy, ex- 
tending from the Loire to the Alps, were at one time 
united under a common head, and at another held by 
hostile kings. The Yisigoths were obscurely quarrelling 
about points of divinity within their barrier of the Py- 
renees. England was the battle-field of half a dozen 
little chieftains who called themselves kings ; Germany 
was only civilized on its western border. Italy was cut 
up into many States, Lombards looking with suspicion 
on the Exarchate, which was still nominally attached to 
the Eastern Empire, and Greeks established in the South, 
sighing for the restoration of their power. Over all this 
chaos of contending powers appeared the mitre and 
crozier of the Pope; always at the head of the dis- 
affected people, supported by the monks, who felt the 
tyranny of the bishops as keenly as the commonalty 
felt the injustice of their lords; always threatening 
vengeance on overweening baron or refractory monarch 
— enhancing his influence with the glory of new miracles 
wrought in his support, and witnessed unblushingly by 
preaching friars, who were the missionaries of papal 
power; concentrating all authority in his hands, and 
gradually laying the foundation for a trampling and 
domination over mind and body such as the world had 
never seen. From this almost universal prostration 
before . the claims of Rome, it is curious to see that the 
native Irish were totally free. With contemptuous in- 



I 50 SEVENTH CENTURY. 

dependence, they for a long time rejected the arrogant 
assumptions of the successor of St. Peter, and were firm 
in their maintenance of the equality of all the Sees. It 
was from the newly-converted Anglo-Saxons that the 
chief recruits in the campaign against the liberties of 
the national churches were collected. Almost all the 
names of missionaries on behalf of the Eoman pontiff 
in this century have the home-sound in our ears of 
"Wighert," "Willibald," " Wernefried," or " Adalbert." 
But there are no Gaelic patronymics from the Churches 
of Ireland or Wales. They were sisters, they haughtily 
said, not daughters of the Eoman See, as the Anglo-Saxon 
Church had been ; and dwelt with pride on the antiquity 
of their conversion before the pretensions of the Eoman 
Bishops had been heard of ; and thus was added one 
more to the elements of dissension which wasted the 
strength of Europe at the very time when unanimity 
was most required. 

But towards the end of this period the rumours of 
a new power in the East drew men's attention to the 
defenceless state in which their internal disagreements 
had left them. The monasteries were filled with exas:- 
gerated reports of the progress of this vast invasion, 
which not only threatened the national existences of 
Europe, but the Christian faith. It was a hostile creed 
and a destroying enemy. What had the Huns been, 
compared with this new swarm — not of savage warriors 
turned aside with a bribe or won by a prayer, but en- 
thusiasts in what they considered a holy cause, flushed 
with victory, armed and disciplined in a style superior 
to any thing the West could show ? We should try to 
enter into the feelings of that distant time, when day 
by day myriads of strange and hitherto unconquerable 
enemies were reported to be on their march. 

In the year 621 of the Christian era, Mohammed 



MOHAMMED. 157 

made his triumphant entry into Medina, a great city of 
Arabia, having been expelled from Mecca by the enmity 
of the Jews and the tribe of Koreish. This entry is 
called the Hegira or Flight, and forms the commence- 
ment of the Moslem chronology. All their records are 
dated from this event. The persons who accompanied 
him were few in number — his father-in-law, some of his 
wives, and some of his warriors ; but the procession was 
increased by the numerous believers in his prophetship 
who resided in the town. At this place began the public 
worship inculcated by the leader. The worshippers 
were summoned by a voice sounding from the highest 
pinnacle of the mosque or church, and pronouncing the 
words which to this hour are heard from every minaret 
in the East : — " God is great ! God is great ! There is no 
God but God. Mohammed is the apostle of God. Come 
to prayers, come to prayers !" and when the invitation 
is given at early dawn, the declaration is added, " Prayer 
is better than sleep ! prayer is better than sleep." These 
exhortations were not without their intended effect. 
Prayer was uttered by many lips, and sleep was banished 
from many eyes; but the prayers were never thought 
so effectual as when accompanied by sword and lance. 
Courage and devotedness were now the great supports 
of the faith. Ali, the husband of Fatima the favourite 
daughter of the chief, fought and prayed with the same 
irresistible force. He conquered the unbelieving Jews 
and Koreishites, cleaving armed men from the crown to 
the chin with one blow, and wielding a city gate which 
eight men could not lift, as a shield. Abou Beker, 
whose daughter was one of the wives of Mohammed, 
was little inferior to Ali: and Mohammed himself saw 
visions which comforted and inspired his followers in 
the midst of battle, and shouted, " On, on ! Fight and 
fear not ! The gates of Paradise are under the shade 

14 



158 



SEVENTH CENTURY. 



of swords. He will assuredly find instant admission 
who falls fighting for the faith 1" It was impossible to 
play the hypocrite in a religion where such strength of 
arm and sharpness of blade were required. Prayers 
might indeed be mechanical, or said for show, but the 
fighting was a real thing, and, as such, prevailed over 
all the shams which were opposed to it. Looking forth 
already beyond the narrow precincts of his power, Mo- 
hammed saw in the distance, across the desert, the 
proud empires of Persia and Constantinople. To both 
he wrote letters demanding their allegiance as God's 
Prophet, and threatening vengeance if they disobeyed. 
Chosroes, the Persian, tore the letter to pieces. " Even 
so," said Mohammed, " shall his kingdom be torn." 
Heraclius the Greek was more respectful. He placed 
the missive on his pillow, and very naturally fell asleep, 
and thought of it no more. But his descendants were 
not long of having their pillows quite so provocative of 
repose. The city of Medina grew too small to hold 
the Prophet's followers, and they went forth conquering 
and to conquer. There were Abou Beker the wise, and 
Omar the faithful, and Khaled the brave, and Ali the 
sword of God. Mecca fell before them, and city after 
city sent in its adhesion to the claims of a Prophet who 
had such dreadful interpreters as these. The religion 
he preached was comparatively true. He destroyed the 
idols of the land, inculcated soberness, chastity, charity, 
and, by some faint transmission of the precepts of the 
Bible, inculcated brotherly love and forgiveness of 
wrong. But the sword was the true gospel. Its light 
was spread in Syria and all the adjoining territories. 
People in apparently sheltered positions could never be 
sure for an hour that the missionaries of the new faith 
would not be climbing over their walls with shouts of 
conquest, and giving them the option of conversion or 



HIS SUCCESSORS. 159 

death. Power spread, in gradually-widening circles, but 
at the centre sad things were going on. Mohammed 
was getting old. He lost his only son. He laid him in 
the grave with tears and sighs, and made his farewell 
pilgrimage to Mecca. Had he no relentings at the 
visible approach of the end? Was he to go to the grave 
untouched by all the calamities he had brought upon 
mankind ? the blood he had shed, the multitudes he had 
beguiled ? He had no touch of remorse for any of these 
tilings; rather he continued firmer in his course than 
ever — seemed more persuaded of the genuineness of his 
mission, and uttered prophecies of the universal exten- 
sion of his faith. " When the angels ask thee who thou 
art/' he said, as the body of his son was lowered into 
the tomb, " say, God is my Lord, the Prophet of God 
was my father, and my faith was Islam !" Islam con- 
tinued his own faith till the last. He tottered to the 
mosque where Abou Beker was engaged in leading the 
prayers of the congregation, and addressed the people 
for the last time. " Every thing happens," he said, " ac- 
cording to the will of God, and has its appointed time, 
which is not to be hastened or avoided. My last com- 
mand to you is that you remain united j that you love, 
honour, and uphold each other; that you exhort each 
other to faith and constancy in belief, and to the per- 
formance of pious deeds : by these alone men prosper ; 
all else leads to destruction." A few days after this 
there was grief and lamentation all over the faithful 
lands. He died on his sixty-third birthday, in the 
eleventh year of the Hegira, which answers to our 
year 632. 

Great contentions arose among the chief disciples for 
the succession to the leadership of the faithful. Abou 
Beker was father-in-law of the Prophet, and his daughter 
supported his cause. Omar was also father-in-law of the 



160 SEVENTH CENTURY. 

Prophet, and his daughter supported his cause. Olhman 
had married two of the daughters of the Prophet, but 
both were dead, and they had left no living child. AH, 
the hero of the conquest, was cousin-german of the 
Prophet, and husband of his only surviving daughter. 
Already the practices of a court were perceptible in the 
Emir's tent. The courtiers caballed and quarrelled ; but 
Ayesha, the daughter of Abou Beker, had been Moham- 
med's favourite wife, and her influence was the most 
effectual. How this influence was exercised amid the 
Oriental habits of the time, and the seclusion to which 
the women were subjected, it is difficult to decide; but, 
after a struggle between her and Hafya, the daughter 
of Omar, the widowed Othman was found to have no 
chance ; and only Ali remained, still young and ardent, 
and fittest, to all ordinary judgments, to be the leader 
of the armies of Allah. While consulting with some 
friends in the tent of Fatima, his rivals came to an 
agreement. In a distant part of the town a meeting 
had been called, and the claims of the different pre- 
tenders debated. Suddenly Omar walked across to 
where Abou Beker stood, bent lowly before him, and 
kissed his hand in token of submission, saying, " Thou 
art the oldest companion and most secret friend of the 
Prophet, and art therefore worthy to rule us in his 
place." The example was contagious, and Abou Beker 
was installed as commander and chief of the believers. 
A resolution was come to at the same time, that any 
attempt at seizing the supremacy against the popular 
will should be punished with death. Ali was constrained 
to yield, but lived in haughty submission till Fatima 
died. He then rose up in his place, and taking his two 
sons with him, Hassan and Hossein, retired into the 
inner district of Arabia, carrying thus from the camp 
of the usurping caliph the only blood of the Prophet- 



PROGRESS OF ISLAM. 161 

chief which flowed in human veins. Yet the spirit of 
the Prophet animated the whole mass. Energy equal to 
Ali's was exhibited in Khaled. Omar was earnest in the 
collection of all the separated portions of the Koran. 
Othman was burning to spread the new empire over the 
whole earth ; and in this combination of courage, ambi- 
tion, and fanaticism all Arabia found its interest to join, 
and ere a year had elapsed from the death of the Pro- 
phet, the whole of that peninsula, and all the swart 
warriors who travelled its sandy steppes, had accepted 
the great watchword of his religion — " There is no God 
but God, and Mohammed is the Prophet of God." Ere 
another year had elapsed the desert had sent forth its 
swarms. The plains of Asia were overflowed. The 
battle-cry of Zeyd, the general of the army, was heard 
in the great commercial cities of the East, and in the 
lands where the gospel of peace had first been uttered, 
Emasa and Damascus, and on the banks of Jordan. It 
was natural that the first effort of the false should be 
directed against the true. But not indiscriminate was 
the wrath of Abou Beker against the professors of Chris- 
tianity. The claims of that dispensation were ever 
treated with respect, but the depraved priesthood were 
held up to contempt. " Destroy not fruit-tree nor fertile 
field on your path," these were the instructions of the 
Caliph to the leaders of the host. " Be just, and spare 
the feelings of the vanquished. Respect all religious 
persons who live in hermitages or convents, and spare 
their edifices. But should you meet with a class of un- 
believers of a different kind, who go about with shaven 
crowns, and belong to the synagogue of Satan, be sure 
you cleave their skulls, unless they embrace the true 
faith or render tribute." 

Gentle and merciful, therefore, to the peaceful in- 
habitants, respectful to the gloomy anchorite and in- 
L 14* 



162 SEVENTH CENTURY. 

dustrious monk, but breathing death and disgrace 
against the proud bishop and ambitious presbyter, the 
mighty horde moved on. Syria fell; the Persian mon- 
archy was menaced, and its western provinces seized; 
a Christian kingdom called Hira, situated on the con- 
fines of Babylonia, was made tributary to Medina ; and 
Khaled stood triumphant on the banks of the Euphrates, 
and sent a message to the Great King, commanding him 
either to receive the faith, or atone for his incredulity 
with half his wealth. The despot's ears were unaccus- 
tomed to such words, and the fiery deluge went on. At 
the end of the third year, Abou Beker died, and Omar 
was the successor appointed by his will. This was 
already a departure from the law of popular election, 
but Islam was busy with its conquests far from its 
central home, and accepted the nomination. Khaled's 
course continued westward and eastward, forcing his 
resistless wedge between the exhausted but still majestic 
empires of the Greeks and Persians. Blow after blow 
resounded as the great march went on. Constantinople, 
and Madayn upon the Tigris, the capitals of Christianity 
and Mithrism, were equally alarmed and equally power- 
less. Omar, the Caliph— the word means the Successor 
of the Apostle — determined to join the army which was 
encamped against the walls of Jerusalem, and added 
fresh vigour to the assailants by the knowledge that 
they fought under his eye. 

Ileraclius, the degenerate inheritor of the throne of 
Constantine, and Yezdegird, the successor of Darius and 
Xerxes, if they had moved towards the seat of war, 
would have been surrounded by all the pomp of their 
exalted stations. Battalions of guards would have en- 
compassed their persons, and countless officers of their 
courts attended their progress. 

Omar, who saw already the world at his feet, journeyed 



PROGRESS OE ISLAM. 163 

by slow stages on a wretched camel, carrying his pro- 
visions hanging from his saddle-bow, and slept at night 
under the shelter of some tree, or on the margin of 
some well. He had but one suit, and that of worsted 
material, and yet his word was law to all those breath- 
less listeners, and wherever he placed his foot from 
that moment became holy ground. Jerusalem and 
Aleppo yielded; Antioch, the chief seat of Grecian 
government, fell into his hands ; Tyre and Tripoli sub- 
mitted to his power; and the Saracenic hosts only 
paused when they reached the border of the sea, which 
they knew washed the fairest shores of Africa and 
Europe. It did not much matter who was in nominal 
command. Khaled died; Amru took his place; and yet 
the tide went on. The great city of Alexandria, which 
disputed with Constantinople the title of Capital of the 
World, with its almost fabulous wealth, its four thou- 
sand palaces, and five thousand baths, and four hundred 
theatres, was twice taken, and brought on the submis- 
sion and conversion of the whole of Egypt. Amru in 
his hours of leisure was devoted to the cultivation of 
taste and genius. In John the Grammarian, a Chris- 
tian student, he found a congenial spirit. Poetry, phi- 
losophy, and rhetoric were treated of in the conversa- 
tions of the Arabic conqueror and the monkish scholar. 
At last, in reliance on his literary taste, the priest con- 
fided to the Moslem that in a certain building in the 
town there was a library so vast that it had no equal on 
earth either for number or value of the manuscripts it 
contained. This was too important a treasure to be 
dealt with without the express sanction of the Caliph. 
So the Christian legend is, that Omar replied to the 
announcement of his general, "Either what those books 
contain is in the Koran, or it is not. If it is, these 
volumes are useless ; if it is not, they are wicked. Burn 



164 SEVENTH CENTURY. 

them." The skins and parchments heated the baths of 
Alexandria for many months, irrecoverable monuments 
of the past, and an everlasting disgrace to the £. .-acen 
name. Yet the story has been doubted; at let ', the 
extent of the destruction. Bather, it has been supposed, 
the ignorant fanaticism of the illiterate monks, in 
covering with the legends of saints the obliterated lines 
of the classic authors, has been more destructive to the 
literary treasures of those ancient times than the furious 
zeal of Amru or the bigotry of Omar. 

If this great overflow from the desert of Arabia had 
consisted of nothing but armed warriors or destructive 
fanatics, its course would have been as transient as it 
was terrible. The Gothic invaders who had desolated 
Europe fortunately possessed the flexibility and adapt- 
iveness of mind which fitted them for the reception of 
the purer faith and more refined manners of the van- 
quished races. They mixed with the people who sub- 
mitted to their power, and in a short time adopted their 
habits and religion. Whatever faith they professed in 
their original seats, seems to have worn out in the long 
course of their immigration. The powers they had 
worshipped in their native wilds Avere local, and depend- 
ent on clime and soil. An easy opening, therefore, 
was left for Christianity into hearts where no hostile 
deity guarded the portal of approach. But with the 
Saracens the case was reversed. Incapable of assimila- 
tion with any rival belief— jealously exclusive of the 
commonest intercourse with the nations they subdued 
— unbending, contemptuous to others, and carried on 
by burning enthusiasm in their own cause, and confi- 
dence in the Prophet they served, there was no possi- 
bility of softening or elevating them from without. The 
pomps of religious worship, which so awed the wonder- 



HABITS OF THE CALIPHS. 168 

ing trities of Franks and Lombards, were lost on a 
people .who considered all pomp offensive both to God 
and nil, They saw the sublimity of simple plainness 
both i' y JWord and life. Their caliph lived on rice, and 
saddled, his camel with his own hands. lie ordered a 
palace to be burned, which Seyd, who had conquered for 
him the capital of Persia, had built for his occupation. 
Unsocial, bigoted, austere, drinking no wine, accumu- 
lating no personal wealth, how was the mind of this 
warrior of the wilderness to be trained to the habits of 
civilized society, or turned aside from the rude instincts 
of destructiveness and domination ? But the Arab in- 
tellect was subtle and active. Mohammedanism, indeed, 
armed the multitude in an exciting cause, and sent them 
forth like a destroying fire; but there was wisdom, 
policy, refinement, among the chiefs. While they de- 
vasted the worn-out territories of the Persian, and laid 
waste his ostentatious cities, which had been purposely 
built in useless places to show the power of the king, 
they founded great towns on sites so adapted for the 
purposes of trade and protection that they continue to 
the present time the emporiums and fortresses of their 
lands. Balsorah, at the top of the Persian Gulf, at the 
junction of the Tigris and the Euphrates, was as wisely 
selected for the commercial wants of that period as 
Constantinople itself. Bagdad was encouraged, Cufa 
built and peopled in exchange for the gorgeous but un- 
wholesome Madayn, from which Yezdegird was driven. 
Many other towns rose under the protection of the 
Crescent; and by the same impulse which made the 
Saracens anxious to raise new centres of wealth and 
enterprise in the East, they were excited to the most 
amazing efforts to make themselves masters of the 
greatest city in the world, the seat of arts, of literature, 



106 SEVENTH CENTURY. 

and religion; and they pushed forward from river to 
river, from plain to plain, till, in the year 672, they 
raised their victorious standard in front of the walls of 
Constantinople. Here, however, a new enemy came to 
the encounter, and for the first time scattered dismay 
among the Moslem ranks. From the towers and tur- 
rets came down a shower of fire, burning, scorching, 
destroying, wherever it touched. Projected to great 
distances, and wrapping in a moment ship after ship 
in unextinguishable flames, these discharges appeared 
to the warriors of the Crescent a supernatural inter- 
ference against them. This was the famous Greek fire, 
of which the components are not now known, but it was 
destructive beyond gunpowder itself. Water could not 
quench it, nor length of time weaken its power. For 
five successive years the assault was renewed by fresh 
battalions of the Saracens, but always with the same 
result. So, giving up at last their attempts against a 
place guarded by lightning and by the unmoved courage 
of the Greek population, they poured their thousands 
along the northern shores of Africa. Cyrene, the once 
glorious capital of the Pentapolis, in which Carthage 
saw her rival and Athens her superior, yielded to their 
power. Everywhere high-peaked mosques, rising where 
a short time before the shore had been unoccupied or in 
cities where the Basilicas of Christian worship had been 
thrown down, marked the course of conquest. Car- 
thage received its new lords. Hippo, the bishopric of 
the best of ancient saints, the holy Augustine, saw its 
church supplanted by the temples of the Arabian im- 
postor. A check was sustained at Tchuda, where their 
course was interrupted by a combined assault of Chris- 
tian Greeks and the indigenous Berbers. Internal 
troubles also arrested their career, for there were dis- 



POWER OF ISLAM. 167 

putes for the succession, and court intrigues and open 
murders, and all the usual accompaniments of a contest 
for an elective throne. One after another, the Caliphs 
had been murdered, or had died of broken hearts. The 
old race — the "Companions," as they were called, be- 
cause they had been the contemporaries and friends of 
Mohammed — had died out. Ali, after three disappoint- 
ments, had at last been chosen. His sons Hassan and 
Hossein had been put to death ; and it was only in the 
time of the eighth successor, when Abdelmalek had 
overcome all competition, that the unity of the Moslem 
Empire was restored, and the word given for conquest 
as before. This was in the 77th year of the Hegira, 
(698 of our era,) and an army was let loose upon the 
great city of Carthage, at the same time that move- 
ments were again ordered across the limits of the 
Grecian Empire, in Asia, and advances made towards 
Constantinople. Carthage fell — Tripoli was occupied — 
and now, with their territories stretching in unbroken 
line from Syria along the two thousand miles of the 
southern shore of the great Mediterranean Sea, the con- 
querors rested from their labours for a while, and pre- 
pared themselves for a dash across the narrow channel, 
from which the hills of Atlas and the summits of Gibral- 
tar are seen at the same time. What has Europe, with 
its divided peoples, its worn-out kings, its indolent 
Church, and exhausted fields, to oppose to this compact 
phalanx of united blood, burning with fanatical faith, 
submissive to one rule, and supported by all the wealth 
of Asia and Africa; whose fleets sweep the sea, and 
whose myriads are every day increased by the acces- 
sion of fresh nations of Berbers, Mauritanians, and the 
nameless children of the desert ? 

This is the hopeless century. Manhood, patriotism, 



168 SEVENTH CENTURY. 

Christianity itself, are all at the lowest ebb. But let 
us turn to the next, and see how good is worked out of 
evil, and acknowledge, as in so many instances the his- 
torian is obliged to do, that man can form no estimate 
of the future from the plainest present appearances, but 
that all things are in the hands of a higher intelligence 
than ours. 



EIGHTH CENTURY. 



Htngs of tf)e dFranftg* 3Emperors of tf)e IBast 



A.D. 

Childebert III. — (cont.) 
711. Dagobert III. ^ Charles 
716. Childeric. V Martel 
720. Thierry. J Mayor. 

742. Childeric III. 

Carlovingian Line. 
751. Pepin the Short. 
7G8. Charlemagne. 



a.d. 

Tiberius. — (cont.) 

711. Philippicus Bardanes. 

713. Anastasius II. 

714. Theodosius III. 
716. Leo the Isaurian. 

741. constantine copronymus. 
775. Leo IV. 

781. CONSTANTINE PoRPHYROGE- 

NITUS. 
802. NlCEPHORUS. 



&tlt|)0r!3, 
Alcuin, (735-804,) Bede, (674-735,) Egbert, Clemens, Dun- 
gal, Acca, John Damascanus. 



15 



THE EIGHTH CENTURY. 

TEMPORAL POWER OF THE POPES — THE EMPIRE OP CHARLE- 
MAGNE. 

This is indeed a great century, which has Pepin of 
Heristhal at its commencement and Charlemagne at its 
end. In this period we shall see the course of the dis- 
solution of manners and government arrested through- 
out the greater part of Europe, and a new form given 
to its ruling powers. We must remember that up to this 
time the progress of what we now call civilization was 
very slow; or we may perhaps almost say that the 
extent of civilized territory was smaller than it had 
been at the final breaking up of the Roman Empire four 
hundred years before. England had lost the elevating 
influences which the residence of Roman generals and 
the presence of disciplined forces had spread from the 
seats of their government. Every occupied position 
had been a centre of life and learning ; and we see still, 
from the discoveries which the antiquaries of the present 
day are continually making, that the dwellings of the 
Praetors and military commanders were constructed in 
a style of luxury and refinement which argues a high 
state of culture and art. All round the circumference 
of the Romanized portion of Britain these head-quarters 
of order and improvement were fixed ; outside of it lay 
the obscure and tumultuous populations of Wales and 
Scotland ; and if we trace the situations of the towns 
with terminations derived from castra, (a camp,) we shall 
see, by stretching a line from Winchester in the south 

171 



172 EIGHTH CENTURY. 

to Ilchostcr, thence up to Gloucester, Worcester, Wrox- 
eter, and Chester, how carefully the "Western Gael were 
prevented from ravaging the peaceful and orderly in- 
habitants ; and, as the same precautions were taken to 
the JSTorth against the Picts and Scots, we shall easily 
be able to estimate the effect of those numerous schools 
of life and manners on the country-districts in which 
they were placed. All these establishments had been 
removed. Barbarism had reasserted her ancient reign ; 
and at the century we have now reached, the institution 
which alone could compete in its elevating effect with 
the old imperial subordination, the Christian Church, 
had not yet established its authority except for the 
benefit of ambitious bishops; and the same anarchy 
reigned in the ecclesiastical body as in the civil orders. 
The eight or nine kingdoms spread over the land were 
sufficiently powerful in their separate nationalities to 
prevent any unity of feeling among the subjects of the 
different crowns. A prelate of the court of Deiria had 
no point of union with a prelate protected by the kings 
of Wessex. And it was this very incapacity of combi- 
nation at home, from the multiplicity of kings, which 
led to the astonishing spectacle in this century of the 
efforts of the Anglo-Saxon clergy in behalf of the Bishop 
of Borne in distant countries. In this great struggle to 
extend the power of the Popes, the regular orders par- 
ticularly distinguished themselves. The fact of sub- 
mitting to convent-rules, of giving up the stormy plea- 
sures of independence for the safe placidity of unreason- 
ing obedience, is a proof of the desire in many human 
minds of having something to which they can look up, 
something to obey, in obeying which their self-respect 
may be preserved, even in the act of offering up their 
self-will — a desire which, in civil actions and the atmo- 
sphere of a court, leads to slavery and every vice, but in 



ENGLISH MONKS. 173 

a monastery conducts to the noblest sacrifices, and fills 
the pages of history with saints and martyrs. The 
Anglo-Saxon, looking out of his convent, saw nothing 
round him which could give him hope or comfort. Laws 
were unsettled, the various little principalities were 
either hostile or unconnected, there was no great com- 
bining authority from which orders could be issued with 
the certainty of being obeyed; and even the clergy, 
thinly scattered, and dependent on the capricious favour 
or exposed to the ignorant animosity of their respective 
sovereigns, were torn into factions, and practically with- 
out a chief. But theoretically there was the noblest 
chiefship that ever was dreamed of by ambition. The 
lowly heritage of Peter had expanded into the universal 
irovernment of the Church. In France this claim had 
not yet been urged ; in the East it had been contemptu- 
ously rejected; in Italy the Lombard kings were hos- 
tile; in Spain the Yisigoths were heretic, and at war 
among themselves ; in Germany the gospel had not yet 
been heard ; in Ireland the Church was a rival bitterly 
defensive of its independence; but in England, among 
the earnest, thoughtful Anglo-Saxons, the majestic idea 
of a great family of all the Christian Churches, wherever 
placed, presided over by the Yicar of Christ and receiv- 
ing laws from his hallowed lips, had impressed itself 
beyond the possibility of being effaced. Home was to 
them the residence of God's vicegerent upon earth; 
obedience to him was worship, and resistance to his 
slightest wish presumption and impiety. So at the 
beginning of this century holy men left their monasteries 
in Essex, and Warwickshire, and Devon, and knelt at 
the footstool of the Pope, and swore fealty and submis- 
sion to the Holy See. 

It has often been observed that the Papacy differs 
from other powers in the continued vitality of its mem- 

15* 



!74 EIGHTH CENTURY. 

bers long after the life has left it at the heart. Borne 
was weak at the centre, but strong at the extremity of 
its domain. The Emperor of Constantinople looked on 
the Pope as his representative in Church-affairs, ratified 
his election, and exacted tribute on his appointment. 
The Exarch of Eavenna, representing as he did the civil 
majesty of the successor of the Caesars, looked down on 
him as his subordinate. There was also a duke in Rome 
whose office it was to superintend the proceedings of the 
bishop, and another officer resident in the Grecian court 
to whom the bishop was responsible for the manage- 
ment of his delegated powers. But outside of all this 
depression and subordination, among tribes of half-bar- 
baric blood, among dreamy enthusiasts contemplating 
what seemed to them the simple and natural scheme of 
an earthly judge infallible in wisdom and divinely in- 
spired; among bewildered and trampled ecclesiastics, 
looking forth into the night, and seeing, far above all 
the storms and darkness that surrounded them in their 
own distracted land, a star by which they might steer 
their course, undimmed and unalterable — the Pope of 
Pome was the highest and holiest of created men. ISTo 
thought is worth any thing that continues in barren 
speculation. Honour, then, to the brave monks of 
England who went forth the missionaries of the Papal 
kings ! Better the struggles and dangers of a plunge 
among the untamed savages of Friesland, and the blood- 
stained forests of the farthest Germany, in fulfilment of 
the office to which they felt themselves called, than the 
lazy, slumbering way of life which had already begun to 
be considered the fulfilment of conventual vows. Sol- 
diers of the Cross were they, though fighting for the 
advancement of an ambitious commander more than the 
success of the larger cause; and we may well exult in 
the virtues which their undoubting faith in the supremacy 



DESCENDANTS OF CLOVIS. 1*6 

of the pontiff called forth, since it contrasts so nobly 
with the apathy and indifference to all high and self- 
denying co-operation which characterized the rest of the 
world. We shall see the monk Winifried penetrate, as 
the Pope's minister, into the darkness beyond the Rhine, 
and emerge, with crozier and mitre, as Boniface the 
Archbishop of Mayence, and converter to the Christian 
faith of great and populous nations which were long the 
most earnest supporters of the rights and pre-eminence 
of Rome. This is one strong characteristic of this cen- 
tury, the increased vigour of the Papacy by the efforts 
of the Anglo-Saxons on its behalf; and now we are going 
to another still stronger characteristic, the further in- 
crease of its influence by the part it played in the change 
of dynasty in France. 

A strange fortune, which in the old Greek mytholo- 
gies would have been looked on as a fate, overshadowing 
the blood-stained house of Clovis, had befallen his de- 
scendants through all their generations for more than a 
hundred years. Feeble in mind, and even degenerated 
in body, the kings of that royal line had been a sight of 
grief and humiliation to their nominal subjects. Married 
at fifteen, they had all sunk into premature old age, or 
died before they were thirty. Too listless for work, 
and too ignorant for council, they had accepted the re- 
stricted sphere within which their duties were confined, 
and showed themselves, on solemn occasions, at the 
festivals of the Church, and other great anniversaries, 
bearing, like their ancestors, the long flowing locks 
which were the natural sign of their crowned supremacy, 
seated in a wagon drawn by oxen, and driven by a 
wagoner with a goad — a primitive relic of vanished 
times, and as much out of place in Paris in the eighth 
century as the state carriage of the Queen or the Lord- 
Mayor's coach of the present day among ourselves. 



176 EIGHTH CENTURY. 

Strange thoughts must have passed through the minds 
of the spectators as they saw the successors of the rough 
leader of the Franks degraded to this condition ; but the 
change had been gradual; the public sentiment had 
become reconciled to the apparent uselessness of the 
highest offices of the State ; for under another title, and 
with much inferior rank, there was a man who held the 
reins of government with a hand of iron, and whose 
power was perhaps strengthened by the fiction which 
called him the servant and minister of the faineant or 
do-nothing king. A succession of men arose in the 
family of the mayors of the palace, as remarkable for 
policy and talent as the representatives of the royal line 
were for the want of these qualities. The origin of 
their office was conveniently forgotten, or converted by 
the flattery of their dependants into an equality with 
the monarchs. Chosen, they said, by the same elective 
body which nominated the king, they were as much en- 
titled to the command of the army and the administra- 
tion of the law as their nominal masters to the posses- 
sion of the palace and royal name. And when for a 
long period this claim was allowed, who was there to 
stand up in opposition, either legal or forcible, to a man 
who appointed all the judges and commanded all the 
troops? The office at last became hereditary. The 
successive mayors left their dignity to their sons by 
will ; and time might have been slow in bringing power 
and title into harmony with each by giving the name 
of king to the man who already exercised all the kingly 
power and fulfilled all the kingly duties, if Charles Mar- 
tel, the mayor, had not, in 732, established such claims 
to the gratitude of Europe by his defeat of the Saracens, 
who were about to overrun the whole of Christendom, 
that it was impossible to refuse either to himself or 
his successor the highest dignity which Europe had to 



CHARLES MARTEL. 177 

bestow. When other rulers and princes were willing to 
acknowledge his superiority, not only in power, but in 
rank and dignity, it was necessary that their submission 
should be offered, not to a mere Major-domo, or chief 
domestic of a court, but to a free sovereign and anointed 
king. The two most amazing fictions, therefore, which 
ever flourished on the contemptuous forbearance of man- 
kind, were both about to expire beneath the breath of 
reality at this time — the kingship of the descendants of 
Clovis, and the pretensions of the successors of Constan- 
tine. The Saracens appeared upon the scene, and those 
gibbering and unsubstantial ghosts, as if they scented 
the morning air, immediately disappeared. The Empe- 
rors of the East, by a self-deluding process, which pre- 
served their dignity and flattered their pride, professed 
still to consider themselves the lords of the Eoman 
Empire, and took particular pains to acknowledge the 
kings and potentates, who established themselves in the 
various portions of it, as their representatives and lieu- 
tenants. They lost no time in sending the title of Patri- 
cian and the ensigns of royal rank to the successful 
founders of a new dynasty, and had gained their object 
if they received the new ruler's thanks in return. At 
Eome, as we have said, they protected the bishop, and 
gave him the investiture of his office. They retained 
also the territories called the Exarchate of Eavenna, 
but with no power of vindicating their authority if it 
was disputed, or of exacting revenue, except what the 
gratitude of the bishop or the Exarch might induce 
them to present to their patron on their nomination or 
instalment. A long-haired, sad-countenanced, decrepit 
young man in a wagon drawn by oxen, and a vain 
voluptuary, wrapped in Oriental splendour, without in- 
fluence or wealth, were the representatives at this time 
of the irresistible power of the Frankish warriors, and 
M 



178 



EIGHTH CENTURY. 



the glories of Julius and Augustus. But the present had 
its representatives as well as the past. Charles Martel 
had still the Prankish sword at his command; the 
Roman Pontiff had thousands ready to believe and sup- 
port his claims to be the spiritual ruler of the world. 
Something was required to unite them in one vast effort 
at unity and independence, and this opportunity was 
afforded them by the common danger to which the 
Saracenic invasion exposed equally the civil and eccle- 
siastical power. Africa, we have seen, was fringed 
along the whole of the Mediterranean border with 
the followers of the Prophet. In one generation the 
blood of the Arabian and Mauritanian deserts became 
so blended, that no distinction whatever existed between 
the men of Mecca and Medina and the native tribes. 
Where Carthaginian and Eoman civilization had never 
penetrated, the faith of Mohammed was accepted as an 
indigenous growth. Fanaticism and ambition sailed 
across the Channel ; and early in this century the hot 
breath of Mohammedanism had dried up the promise 
of Spain ; countless warriors crossed to Gibraltar ; their 
losses were supplied by the inexhaustible populations 
from the interior, (the ancestors of the Abd-el Kaders 
and Ben Muzas of modern times,) and, elate with hopes 
of universal conquest, the crowded tents of the Moslem 
army were seen on the northern slopes of the Pyrenees, 
and presently all the plains of Languedoc, and the cen- 
tral fields of France as far up as the Loire, were in- 
undated by horse and man. Incredible accounts are 
given of the number and activity of the desert steeds 
bestrode by these turbaned apostles. A march of a 
hundred miles — a village set on fire, and all the males 
extirpated — strange-looking visages, and wild arrays 
of galloping battalions seen by terrified watchers from 
the walls of Paris itself; then, in the twinkling of an 



BATTLE OF TOURS. 179 

eye, nothing visible but the distant dust raised up in 
their almost unperceived retreat, — these were the pecu- 
liarities of this new and unheard-of warfare. And 
while these dashes were made from the centre of the 
invasion, alarming the inhabitants at the extremities 
of the kingdom, the host steadily moved on, secured 
the ground behind it before any fresh advance, and 
united in this way the steadiness of European settle- 
ment with the wild fury of the original mode of attack. 
Already the provinces abutting on the Pyrenees had 
owned their power. Gascony up to the Garonne, and 
the Narbonnais nearly to the Rhine, had submitted to 
the conquerors ; but when the dispossessed proprietors 
of Novempopulania and Septimania, as those districts 
were then called, and the powerful Duke of Aquitaine, 
also fled before the advancing armies; when all the 
churches were filled with prayer, and all the towns 
were in momentary expectation of seeing the irresist- 
ible horsemen before their walls, patriotism and re- 
ligion combined to call upon all the Franks and all the 
Christians to expel the infidel invader. So Charles, the 
son of Pepin, whose exploits against the Frisons and 
other barbaric peoples in the North had already ac- 
quired for him the complimentary name of Martel, or 
the Hammer, put himself at the head of the military 
forces of the land, and encountered the Saracenic my- 
riads on the great plain round Tours. The East and 
West were brought front to front — Christianity and 
Mohammedanism stood face to face for the first time ; 
and it is startling to consider for a moment what the 
result of an Asiatic victory might have been. If ever 
there was a case in which the intervention of Divine 
Providence may be claimed without presumption on the 
conquering side, it must be here, where the truths of 
revelation and the progress of society were dependent 



180 EIGHTH CENTURY. 

on the issue. The two faiths, according to all human 
calculation, had rested their supremacy on their respect- 
ive champions. If Charles and his Franks and Ger- 
mans were defeated, there was nothing to resist the 
march of the perpetually-increasing numbers of the Sara- 
cens till they had planted their standards on the pinnacles 
of Eome. The first glow of Christian belief had been 
exchanged, we have seen, for ambitious disputes, or died 
off in many of the practices of superstition. The very 
man in whom the Christian hope was placed was sus- 
pected of leaning to the Wodenism of his Northern ances- 
tors, and was scarcely bought over to the defence of 
the Church's faith by a permission to pillage the Church's 
wealth. Mohammedanism, on the other hand, w T as fresh 
and young. Its promises were clear and tempting — its 
course triumphant, and its doctrines satisfactory equally 
to the pride and the indolence of the human heart. But 
in the former, though unperceived by the warriors at 
Tours and the prelates at Eome, lay the germ of count- 
less blessings — elevating the mind by the discovery of 
its strength at the same moment in which it is abased 
by the feeling of its weakness, and gifted above all with 
the power of expansion and universality ; themselves 
proofs of its divine original, to which no false religion 
can lay the slightest claim. Cultivate the Christian 
mind to the highest — fill it with all knowledge — place 
round it the miracles of science and art — station it in 
the snows of Iceland or the heats of India — Chris- 
tianity, like the all-girding horizon of the sky, widens 
its circle so as to include the loftiest, and contain within 
its embrace the utmost diversities of human life and 
speculation. But with the Mohammedan, as with other 
impostures, the range is limited. When intellect expands, 
it bursts the cerement in which it has been involved ; 
and with Buddhism, and Mithrism, and Hindooism, it 



DEFEAT OF THE SARACENS. 181 

will be as it was with Druidism, and the more elegant 
heathendom of Greece and Eome : there will be no 
safety for them but in the ignorance and barbarism of 
their disciples. On the result of that great day at Tours 
in the year 732, therefore, depended the intellectual im- 
provement and civil freedom of the human race. Few 
particulars are preserved of this momentous battle; but 
the result showed that the light cavalry, in which the 
Saracens excelled, were no match for the firm line of 
the Franks. When confusion once began among the 
swarthy cavaliers of Abderachman, there was no resto- 
ration possible. In wild confusion the melee was con- 
tinued; and all that can be said is, that the slaughter of 
upwards of three hundred thousand of these impulsive 
pilgrims of the desert so weakened the Saracenic power 
in Europe, that in no long time their hosts were with- 
drawn from the soil of G-aul, and guarded with diffi- 
culty the conquest they had made behind the barrier of 
the Pyrenees. Could the gratitude of Church or State 
be too generous to the man who preserved both from the 
sword of the destroyer ? If Charles pillaged a monas- 
tery or seized the revenues of a bishopric, nobody found 
any fault. It was almost just that he should have the 
wealth of the cathedral from which he had driven away 
the mufti and muezzin. But monasteries and bishops 
were still powerful, and did not look on the proceedings 
of Charles the Hammer with the equanimity of the 
unconcerned spectators. They perhaps thought the 
battle of Tours had only given them a choice of spoilers, 
instead of protection from spoliation. In a short time, 
however, the policy of the sagacious leader led him to 
see the necessity of gaining over the only united body 
in the State. He became a benefactor of the Church, 
and a staunch ally of the Koman bishop. Both had an 
object to obtain. What the phantom king was to 

16 



I 82 EIGHTH CENTURY. 

Charles, the phantom emperor was to the Pope. If 
there was unison between the two dependants, it would 
be easy to get rid of the two superiors. Presents and 
compliments were interchanged, and moral support 
trafficked for material aid. Wherever the one sent 
missionaries with the Cross, the other sent warriors to 
their support. The Pontiff bestowed on the Mayor the 
keys of the sepulchre of St. Peter, and the title of Consul 
and Patrician, and begged him to come to his assistance 
against Luitprand, the Lombard king. But this was far 
too great an exploit to be expected by a simple Bishop, 
and performed by a simple Mayor of the Palace. So 
the next great thing we meet with in this century is the 
investiture of the Mayor with the title of king, and of 
the Bishop with the sovereignty of Rome and Ravenna. 
This happened in 752. Pepin the Short, as he was un- 
flatteringly called by his subjects, succeeded Charles in 
the government of the Franks. The king was Childe- 
ric the Third, who lived in complete seclusion and 
cherished his long hair as the only evidence of monarchy 
left to the sons of Clovis. "Wars in various regions esta- 
blished the reputation of Pepin as the worthy successor 
of Charles; and by a refinement of policy, the crown, 
the consummation of all his hopes, was reached in a 
manner which deprived it of the appearance of injustice, 
for it was given to him by the hands of saints and popes, 
and ratified by the council of the nation. He had 
already asked Pope Zachariah, "who had the best right 
to the name of king ? — he who had merely the title, or 
he who had the power V And in answer to this, which 
was rather a puzzling question, our countryman Wini- 
fried, in his new character of Boniface and archbishop, 
placed upon his head the golden round, and Might and 
Right were restored to their original combination. But 
St. Boniface was not enough. In two years the Pope 



THE POPE A SOVEREIGN. 183 

himself clambered over the Alps and anointed the new 
monarch with holy oil; and by the same act stripped 
the long hair from the head of the Merovingian puppet, 
and condemned him and his descendants to the privacy 
of a cloister. 

Now then that Pepin is king, let Luitprand, or any 
other potentate, beware how he does injury to the Pope 
of Eome. Twice the Frank armies are moved into 
Italy in defence of the Holy See ; and at last the Exarch- 
ate is torn from the hands of its Lombard oppressor, 
and handed over in sovereignty to the Spiritual Power. 
Eome itself is declared at the same time the property of 
the Bishop, and free forever from the suzerainty of the 
Emperors of the East. No wonder the gratitude of the 
Popes has made them call the kings of France the eldest 
sons of the Church. Their donations raised the bishop- 
ric to the rank of a royal state; yet it has been re- 
marked that the generosity of the French monarchs 
has always been limited to the gift of other people's 
lands. They were extremely liberal in bestowing large 
tracts of country belonging to the Lombard kings or 
the Byzantine Caesars; but they kept a very watchful 
eye on the possessions of pope and bishop within their 
own domain. They reserved to themselves the usufruct 
of vacant benefices, and the presentations to church and 
abbey. At almost all periods, indeed, of their history, 
they have seemed to retain a very clear remembrance 
of the position which they held towards the Papacy 
from the beginning, and, while encouraging its arro- 
gance against other principalities and powers, have held 
a very contemptuous language towards it themselves. 

This, then, is the great characteristic of the present 
century, the restoration of the monarchical principle in 
the State, and its establishment in the Church. During 
all these wretched centuries, from the fall of the Eoman 



184 EIGHTH CENTURY. 

Empire, the progress has been towards diffusion and 
separation. Kings rose up here and there, but their 
kingships were local, and, moreover, so recent, that 
they were little more than the first officer or representa- 
tive of the warriors whose leaders they had been. A 
longing for some higher and remoter influence than this 
had taken possession of the chiefs of all the early inva- 
sions, and we have seen them (even while engaged in 
wresting whole districts from the sway of the old Roman 
Empire) accepting with gratitude the ensigns of Roman 
authority. We have seen Gothic kings glorying in the 
name of Senator, and Hunnish savages pacified and con- 
tented by the title of Praetor or Consul. The world 
had been accustomed to the oneness of Consular no less 
than Imperial Rome for more than a thousand years; 
for, however the parties might be divided at home, the 
great name of the Eternal City was the sole sound 
heard in foreign lands. The magic letters, the initials 
of the Senate and People, had been the ornament of 
their banners from the earliest times, and a division of 
power was an idea to which the minds of mankind found 
it difficult to become accustomed. It was better, there- 
fore, to have only a fragment of this immemorial unity 
than the freshness of a new authority, however exten- 
sive or unquestionable. Yague traditions must have 
come down — magnified by distance and softened by 
regret — of the great days before the purple was torn 
in two by the transference of the seat of power to Con- 
stantinople. There were nearly five hundred years 
lying between the periods ; and all the poetic spirits of 
the new populations had cast longing, lingering looks 
behind at the image of earthly supremacy presented to 
them by the existence of an acknowledged master of 
the world. A pedantic sophist, speaking Greek — the 
language of slaves and scholars — wearing the loftiest 



DEFENCE OF IMAGES. 185 

titles, and yet hemmed in within the narrow limits of a 
single district, assumed to be the representative of the 
universal "Lord of human kind," and called himself 
Emperor of the East and "West. The common sense 
of Goth and Saxon, of Frank and Lombard, rebelled 
against this claim, when they saw it urged by a person 
unable to support it by fleets and armies. When, in 
addition to this want of power, they perceived in this 
century a want of orthodox belief, or even what they 
considered an impious profanity, in the successor of 
Augustus and Constantine, they were still more disin- 
clined to grant even a titular supremacy to the Byzan- 
tine ruler. Leo, at that time wearing the purple, and 
zealous for the purity of the faith, issued an order for 
the destruction of the marble representations of saints 
and martyrs which had been used in worship; and 
within the limits of his personal authority his mandate 
was obeyed. But when it reached the West, a furious 
opposition was made to his command. The Pope stood 
forward as champion of the religious veneration of 
" storied urn and animated bust." The emperor was 
branded with the name of Iconoclast, or the Image- 
breaker, and the eloquence of all the monks in Europe 
was let loose upon the sacrilegious Caesar. Interest, it 
is to be feared, added fresh energy to their conscientious 
denunciations, for the monks had attracted to them- 
selves a complete monopoly of the manufacture of these 
aids to devotion — and obedience to Leo's- order would 
have impoverished the monasteries all over the land. 
A Western emperor, it was at once perceived, would 
not have been so blind to the uses of those holy sculp- 
tures, and soon an intense desire was manifested through- 
out the Western nations for an emperor of their own. 
Already they were in possession of a spiritual chief, 
who claimed the inheritance of the Prince of the Apos- 

16* 



186 



EIGHTH CENTURY. 



ties, and looked down on the Patriarchs of Constanti- 
nople as bishops subordinate to his throne. Why should 
not they also have a temporal ruler who should renew 
the old glories of the vanished Empire, and exercise 
supremacy over all the governors of the earth ? Why, 
indeed, should not the first of those authorities exert 
his more than human powers in the production of the 
other ? He had converted a Mayor of the Palace into 
a King of the Franks. Could he not go a step further, 
and convert a King of the Franks into an Emperor of 
the West? With this hope, not yet perhaps expressed, 
but alive in the minds of Pepin and the prelates of 
France, no attempt was made to check the Roman pon- 
tiffs in the extravagance of their pretensions. Lords 
of wide domains, rich already in the possession of large 
tracts of country and wealthy establishments in other 
lands, they were raised above all competition in rank 
and influence with any other ecclesiastic ; and relying 
on spiritual privileges, and their exemption from active 
enmity, they were more powerful than many of the 
greatest princes of the time. Everywhere the mystic 
dignity of their office was dwelt upon by their sup- 
porters. For a long time, as we have seen, their om- 
nipotence was acknowledged by the two classes who 
saw in the use of that spiritual dominion a counterpoise 
to the worldly sceptres by which they were crushed. 
But now the worldly sceptres came to the support of the 
spiritual dominion. Its limit was enlarged, and made to 
include the regulation of all human affairs. It was its 
; office to subdue kings 'and bind nobles in links of 
iron ; and when the son of Pepin, Charles, justly 
called the Great, though travestied by French vanity 
into the name of Charlemagne, sat on the throne of 
the Franks, and carried his arms and influence into the 
remotest States, it was felt that the hour and the man 



TENDENCY TO IMPERIALISM. lg 7 

were come; and the Western Empire was formally re- 
newed. 

The curious thing is, that this longing for a restora- 
tion of the Roman Empire, and dwelling on its useful- 
ness and grandeur, were dominant, and productive of 
great events, in populations which had no drop of 
Roman blood in their veins. The last emperor resident 
in Rome had never heard the names of the hordes of 
savages whose descendants had now seized the plains 
of France and Italy. Yet it seemed as if, with the ter- 
ritory of the Roman Empire, they had inherited its 
traditions and hopes. They might be Saxons, or Franks, 
or Burgundians, or Lombards, by national descent, but 
by residence they were Romans as compared with the 
Greeks in the East, — and by religion they were Romans 
as compared with the Sclaves and Saracens, who pressed 
on them on the North and South. It would not be diffi- 
cult in this country to find the grandchildren of French 
refugees boasting with patriotic pride of the English 
triumphs at Cressy and Agincourt — or the sons of 
Scottish parents rejoicing in their ancestors' victory 
under Cromwell at Dunbar; and here, in the eighth 
century, the descendants of Alaric and Clovis were 
patriotically loyal to the memory of the old Empire, 
and were reminded by the victories of Charlemagne of 
the trophies of Scipio and Marius. These victories, 
indeed, were not, as is so often found to be the case, the 
mere efforts of genius and ambition, with no higher 
object than to augment the conqueror's power or repu- 
tation. They were systematically pursued with a view 
to an end. In one advancing tide, all things tended to 
the Imperial throne. Whatever nation felt the force of 
Charlemagne's sword felt also a portion of its humilia- 
tion lightened when its submission was perceived to be 
only an advancement towards the restoration of the old 



188 EIGHTH CENTURY. 

dominion. It might have been degrading to acknow 
ledge the superiority of the son of Pepin — but who 
could offer resistance to the successor of Augustus? 
So, after thirty years of uninterrupted war, with cam- 
paigns succeeding each in the most distant regions, and 
all crowned with conquest; after subduing the Saxons 
beyond the Weser, the Lombards as far as Treviso, the 
Arabs under the walls of Saragossa, the Bavarians in 
the neighbourhood of Augsburg, the Selaves on the 
Elbe and Oder, the Huns and Avars on the Kaab and 
Danube, and the Greeks themselves on the coast of Dal- 
matia; when he looked around and saw no rebellion 
against his authority, but throughout the greater part 
of his domains a willing submission to the centralizing 
power' which rallied all Christian states for the defence 
of Christianity, and all civilized nations for the defence 
of civilization, — nothing more was required than the 
mere expression in definite words of the great thing 
that had already taken place, and Charlemagne, at the 
extreme end of this century, bent before the successor 
of St. Peter at Eome, and stood up crowned Emperor 
of the West, and champion and chief of Christendom. 
The period of Charlemagne is a great date in history; 

* rto «, . for it is the legal and formal termination of 
a.d. 786-814. ; & 

an antiquated state of society. It was also 
the introduction to another, totally distinct from itself 
and from its predecessor. It was not barbarism; it was 
not feudalism; but it was the bridge which united the 
two. By barbarism is meant the uneasy state of govern- 
ments and peoples, where the tribe still predominated 
over the nation; where the Frank or Lombard con- 
tinued an encamped warrior, without reference to the 
soil; and where his patriotism consisted in fidelity to 
the traditions of his descent, and not to the greatness or 
independence of the land he occupied. In the reign of 



CONDITION OF. THE EMPIRE. 189 

Charlemagne, the land of the Frank became practically, 
and even territorially, France ; the district occupied by 
the Lombards became Lombardy. The feeling of pro- 
perty in the soil was added to the ties of race and 
kindred; and at the very time that all the nations of 
the Invasion yielded to the supremacy of one man as 
emperor, the different populations asserted their sepa- 
rate independence of each other, as distinct and self- 
sufficing kingdoms — kingdoms, that is to say, without 
the kings, but in all respects prepared for those indi- 
vidualized expressions of their national life. For though 
Charlemagne, seated in his great hall at Aix-la-Chapelle, 
gave laws to the whole of his vast domains, in each 
country he had assumed to himself nothing more than 
the monarchic power. To the whole empire he was 
emperor, but to each separate people, such as Franks 
and Lombards, he was simply king. Under him there 
were dukes, counts, viscounts, and other dignitaries, but 
each limited, in function and influence, to the territory 
to which he belonged. A French duke had no pre- 
eminence in Lombardy, and a Bavarian graf had no 
rank in Italy. Other machinery was at times employed 
by the central power, in the shape of temporary mes- 
sengers, or even of emissaries with a longer tenure of 
office; but these persons were sent for some special pur- 
pose, and were more like commissioners appointed by 
the Crown, than possessors of authority inherent in them- 
selves. The term of their ambassadorship expired, their 
salary, or the lands they had provisionally held in lieu 
of salary, reverted to the monarch, and they returned 
to court with no further pretension to power or influence 
than an ambassador in our days when he returns from the 
country to which he is accredited. But when the great 
local nobility found their authority indissolubly con- 
nected with their possessions, and that ducal or princely 



190 EIGHTH CENTURY. 

privileges were hereditary accompaniments of their 
lands, the foundations of modern feudalism were already 
laid, and the path to national kingship made easy and 
unavoidable. When Charlemagne's empire broke into 
pieces at his death, we still find, in the next century, 
that each piece was a kingdom. Modern Europe took 
its rise from these fragmentary though complete por- 
tions j and whereas the breaking-up of the first empire 
left the world a prey to barbaric hordes, and desolation 
and misery spread over the fairest lands, the disruption 
of the latter empire of Charlemagne left Europe united 
as one whole against Saracen and savage, but separated 
in itself into many well-defined states, regulated in 
their intercourse by international law, and listening 
with the docility of children to the promises or threaten- 
ings of the Father of the Universal Church. For with 
the empire of Charlemagne the empire of the Papacy 
had grown. The temporal power was a collection of 
forces dependent on the life of one man; the spiritual 
power is a principle which is independent of individual 
aid. So over the fragments, as we have said, of the 
broken empire, rose higher than ever the unshaken 
majesty of Eome. Civil authority had shrunk up within 
local bounds; but the Papacy had expanded beyond the 
limits of time and space, and shook the dreadful keys 
and clenched the two-edged sword which typified its 
dominion over both earth and heaven. 



NINTH CENTURY. 



a.d. West. a.d. East. 

800. Charlemagne, (crowned Nicephorus — (cont.) 

by the Pope.) 811. Michael. 

814. Louis the Debonnaire. 813. Leo the Armenian. 

840. Charles the Bald. 821. Michael the Stammerer. 

877. Louis the Stammerer. 829. Theofhilus. 

879. Louis III. and Carlo- 842. Michael III. 

man. 886. Leo the Philosopher. 
884. Charles the Fat. 
887. Arnold. 
899. Louis IV. 

iftmgs of ^France- 

887. Eudes, (Count of Paris.) 898. Charles the Simple. 

827. Egbert. 860. Ethelbert. 

837. Ethelwolf. 866. Ethelred. 

857. Ethelbald. 872. Alfred the Great. 

giutfjorg* 

John Scotus, (Erigena,) Hincmar, Heric, (preceded Dos 
irtes in philosophical investigation,) Macarius. 



THE NINTH CENTUKY. 

DISMEMBERMENT OF CHARLEMAGNE'S EMPIRE DANISH IN- 
VASION OF ENGLAND WEAKNESS OF FRANCE REIGN OF 

ALFRED. 

The first year of this century found Charlemagne 
with the crown of the old Empire upon his head, and 
the most distant parts of the world filled with his repu- 
tation. As in the case of the first Napoleon, we find 
his antechambers crowded with the fallen rulers of the 
conquered territories, and even with sovereigns of neigh- 
bouring countries. Among others, two of our Anglo- 
Saxon princes found their way to the great man's court 
at Aix-la-Chapelle. Eardulf of Northumberland pleaded 
his cause so well with Charlemagne and the Pope, that 
by their good offices he was restored to his states. But 
a greater man than Eardulf was also a visitor and careful 
student of the vanquisher and lawgiver of the Western 
world. Originally a Prince of Kent, ho had been ex- 
pelled by the superior power or arts of Beortrick, King 
of the West Saxons, and had betaken himself for pro- 
tection, if not for restoration, to the most powerful ruler 
of the time. Whether Egbert joined in his expeditions 
or shared his councils, we do not know, but the history 
of the Anglo-Saxon monarchies at this date (800 to 830) 
shows us the exact counterpart, on our own island, of 
the actions of Charlemagne on the wider stage of conti- 
nental Europe. Egbert, on the death of Beortrick, ob- 
tained possession of Wessex, and one by one the sepa- 
rate states of the British Heptarchy were subdued; 
N 17 193 



19 * NINTH CENTURY. 

some reduced to entire subjection, others only to sub- 
ordinate rank and the payment of tribute, till, when all 
things were prepared for the change, Egbert proclaimed 
the unity of Southern Britain by assuming the title of 
Bretwalda, in the same way as his prototype had re- 
stored the unity of the empire by taking the dignity of 
Emperor. It is pleasant to pause over the period of 
Charlemagne's reign, for it is an isthmus connecting two 
dark and unsatisfactory states of society, — a past of 
disunion, barbarity, and violence, and a future of igno- 
rance, selfishness, and crime. The present was not, 
indeed, exempt from some or all of these characteristics. 
There must have been quarrellings and brutal animosities 
on the outskirts of his domain, where half-converted 
Franks carried fire and sword, in the name of religion, 
among the still heathen Saxons; there must have been 
insolence and cruelty among the bishops and priests, 
whose education, in the majority of instances, was 
limited to learning the services of the Church by heart. 
Many laymen, indeed, had seized on the temporalities 
of the sees; and, in return, many bishops had arrogated 
to themselves the warlike privileges and authority of 
the counts and viscounts. But within the radius of 
Charlemagne's own influence, in his family apartments, 
or in the great Hall of Audience at Aix-la-Chapelle, the 
astonishing sight was presented of a man refreshing him- 
self, after the fatigues of policy and war, by converting his 
house into a college for the advancement of learning 
and science. From all quarters came the scholars, and 
grammarians, and philosophers of the time. Chief of 
these was our countryman, the Anglo-Saxon monk 
Alcuin, and from what remains of his writings we caw 
only regret that, in the infancy of that new civilization, 
his genius, which was undoubtedly great, was devoted 
to trifles of no real importance. Others came to fill up 



Charlemagne's court. 195 

that noblo company; and it is surely a great relief from 
the bloody records with which we have so long been 
familiar, to see Charlemagne at home, surrounded by 
eons and daughters, listening to readings and translations 
from Roman authors; entering himself into disquisi- 
tions on philosophy and antiquities, and acting as presi- 
dent of a select society of earnest searchers after infor- 
mation. To put his companions more at their ease, he 
hid the terrors of his crown under an assumed name, 
and only accepted so much of his royal state as his 
friends assigned to him by giving him the name of King 
David. The best versifier was known as Virgil. Alcuin 
himself was Horace; and Angelbert, who cultivated 
Greek, assumed the proud name of Homer. These 
literary discussions, however, would have had no better 
effect than refining the court, and making the days pass 
pleasantly; but Charlemagne's object was higher and 
more liberal than this. Whatever monastery he founded 
or endowed was forced to maintain a school as part of 
its establishment. Alcuin was presented with the great 
Abbey of St. Martin of Tours, which possessed on its 
domain twenty thousand serfs, and therefore made him 
one of the richest land-owners in France. There, at full 
leisure from worldly cares, he composed a vast number 
of books, of very poor philosophy and very incorrect 
astronomy, and perhaps looked down from his lofty 
eminence of wealth and fame on the humble labours of 
young Eginhart, the secretary of Charlemagne, who has 
left us a Life of his master, infinitely more interesting 
and useful than all the dissertations of the sage. From 
this great Life we learn many delightful characteristics 
of the great man, his good-heartedness, his love of jus- 
tice, and blind affection for his children. But it is with 
his public works, as acting on this century, that we have 
now to do. Throughout the whole extent of his empire 



196 NINTH CENTURY, 

he founded Academics, both for learning and for useful 
occupations. He encouraged the study and practice of 
agriculture and trade. The fine arts found him a munifi- 
cent patron; and though the objects on which the artist's 
skill was exercised were not more exalted than the 
carving of wooden tables, the moulding of metal cups, 
and the casting of bells, the circumstances of the time 
are to be taken into consideration, and these efforts may- 
be found as advanced, for the ninth century, as the 
works of the sculptors and metallurgists of our own 
day. It is painful to observe that the practice of what 
is now called adulteration was not unknown at that 
early period. There was a monk of the name of Tancho, 
in the monastery of St. Grail, who produced the first bell. 
Its sound was so sweet and solemn, that it was at once 
adopted as an indispensable portion of the ornament of 
church and chapel, and soon after that, of the religious 
services themselves. Charlemagne, hearing it, and per- 
haps believing that an increased value in the meta 
would produce a richer tone, sent him a sufficient 
quantity of silver to form a second bell. The monk, 
tempted by the facility of turning the treasure to his 
own use, brought forward another specimen of his skill, 
but of a mixed and very inferior material. What the 
just and severe emperor might have done, on the dis- 
covery of the fraud, is not known ; but the story ended 
tragically without the intervention of the legal sword. 
At the first swing of the clapper it broke the skull of 
the dishonest founder, who had apparently gone too 
near to witness the action of the tongue; and the be! 
was thenceforth looked on with veneration, as the 
discoverer and punishcr of the unjust manufacturer. 

The monks, indeed, seem to have been the most re- 
fractory of subjects, perhaps because they were already 
exempted from the ordinary punishments. In order tc 



PSALMODY. 197 

produce uniformity in the services and chants of the 
Church, the emperor sent to Home for twelve monkish 
musicians, and distributed them in the twelve principal 
bishoprics of his dominions. The twelve musicians 
would not consent to be musical according to order, and 
made the confusion greater than ever, for each of them 
taught different tunes and a different method. The dis- 
appointed emperor could only complain to the Pope, and 
the Pope put the recusant psalmodists in prison. But it 
appears the fate of Charlemagne, as of all persons in 
advance of their age, to be worthy of congratulation 
only for his attempts. The success of many of his 
undertakings was not adequate to the pains bestowed 
upon them. He held many assemblages, both lay and 
ecclesiastical, during his lengthened reign ; he published 
many excellent laws, which soon fell into disuse; he 
tried many reforms of churches and monasteries, which 
shared the same fortune j he held the Popes of Eome 
and the dignitaries of his empire in perfect submission, 
but professed so much respect for the office of Pontiff 
and Bishop, that, when his own overwhelming supe- 
riority was withdrawn, the Church rebelled against the 
State, and claimed dominion over it. His sense of jus- 
tice, as well as the custom of the time, led him to divide 
his states among his sons, which not only insured enmity 
between them, but enfeebled the whole of Christendom. 
Clouds, indeed, began to gather over him some time 
before his reign was ended. One day he was at a city 
of Narbonese Gaul, looking out upon the Mediterranean 
Sea. He saw some vessels appear before the port. 
" These," said the courtiers, " must be ships from the 
coast of Africa, Jewish merchantmen, or British traders." 
But Charlemagne, who had leaned a long time against 
the wall of the room in a passion of tears, s t aid, " No ! 
these are not the ships of commerce ; I know by their 

17* 



198 NINTH CENTURY. 

lightness of movement. They are the galleys of the 
Norsemen ; and, though I know such miserable pirates 
can do me no harm, I cannot help weeping when I think 
of the miseries they will inflict on my descendants and 
the lands they shall rule." A true speech, and just occa- 
sion for grief, for the descents of these Scandinavian 
rovers are the great characteristic of this century, by 
which a new power was introduced into Europe, and 
great changes took place in the career of France and 
England. 

It would perhaps be more correct to say that, by this 
new mixture of race and language, France and England 
were called into existence. England, up to this date, 
had been a collection of contending states; Franco, a 
tributary portion of a great Germanic empire. Slowly 
stretching northward, the Roman language, modified, 
of course, by local pronunciation, had pushed its way 
among the original Franks. Latin had been for many 
years the language of Divine Service, and of history, 
and of law. All westward of the Rhine had yielded to 
these influences, and the old Teutonic tongue which 
Clovis had brought with him from Germany had long 
disappeared, from the Alps up to the Channel. When 
„, , the death of Charlemagne, in 814, had relaxed 

A.B. 814. & 7 7 

the hold which held all his subordinate states 
together, the diversity of the language of Frenchman 
and German pointed out, almost as clearly as geographi- 
cal boundaries could have done, the limits of the re- 
spective nations. From henceforward, identity of speech 
was to be considered a more enduring bond of union 
than the mere inhabiting of the same soil. But other 
circumstances occurred to favour the idea of a separa- 
tion into well-defined communities; and among these 
the principal was a very long experience of the disad- 
vantages of an encumbered and too extensive empire. 



LOUIS THE DEBONNAIRE. 199 

Even while the sword was held by the strong hand of 
Charlemagne, each portion of his dominions saw with 
dissatisfaction that it depended for its peace and pros- 
perity on the peace and prosperity of all. the rest, and 
yet in this peace and prosperity it had neither voice nor 
influence. The inhabitants of the banks of the Loire 
were, therefore, naturally discontented when they found 
their provisions enhanced in price, and their sons called 
to arms, on account of disturbances on the Elbe, or hos- 
tilities in the south of Italy. These evils of their posi- 
tion were further increased when, towards the end of 
Charlemagne's reign, the outer circuit of enemies became 
more combined and powerful. In proportion as he had 
extended his dominion, he had come into contact with 
tribes and states with whom it was impossible to be on 
friendly terms. To the East, he touched upon the irre- 
claimable Sclaves and Avars — in the South, he came on 
the settlements of the Italian Greeks — in Spain, he 
rested upon the Saracens of Cordova. It was hard for 
the secure centre of the empire to be destroyed and 
ruined by the struggles of the frontier populations, with 
which it had no more sympathy in blood and language 
than with the people with whom they fought. Already, 
also, we have seen how local their government had 
become. They had their own dukes and counts, their 
own bishops and priests to refer to. The empire was, in 
fact, a name, and the land they inhabited the only 
reality with which they were concerned. "We shall not 
be surprised, therefore, when we find that universal re- 
bellion took place when Louis the Debonnaire, the just 
and saint-like successor of Charlemagne, endeavoured 
to carry on his father's system. Even his reforms served 
only to show his own unselfishness, and to irritate the 
grasping and avaricious offenders whom it was his object 
to amend; Bishops were stripped of their lay lordships 



200 NINTH CENTURY. 

— prevented from wearing sword and arms, and even 
deprived of the military ornament of glittering spurs to 
their heels. The monks and nuns, who had almost uni- 
versally fallen into evil courses, were forcibly reformed 
by the laws of a second St. Benedict, whose regulations 
were harsh towards the regular orders, but useless to 
the community at large — a sad contrast to the agricul- 
tural and manly exhortations of the first conventual 
legislator of that name. Nothing turned out well with 
this simplest and most generous of the Carlovingian 
kings. His virtues, inextricably interlaced as they 
were with the weaknesses of his character, were more 
injurious to himself and his kingdom than less amiable 
qualities would have been. Priest and noble were equally 
ignorant of the real characteristics of a Christian life. 
When he refunded the exactions of his father, and re- 
stored the conquests which he considered illegally ac- 
quired, the universal feeling of astonishment was only 
lost in the stronger sentiment of disdain. An excellent 
monk in a cell, or judge in a court of law, Louis the 
Debonnaire was the most unfit man of his time to keep 
discordant nationalities in awe. His children were as 
unnatural as those of Lear, whom he resembled in some 
other respects : for he found what little reverence waits 
upon a discrowned king ; and personal indignities of the 
most degrading kind were heaped upon him by those 
whose duty it was to maintain and honour him. Super- 
stition was set to work on his enfeebled mind, and twice 
he did public penance for crimes of which he was not 
guilty ; and on the last occasion, stripped of his military 
baldric — the lowest indignity to which a Frankish mon- 
arch could be subjected — clothed in a hair shirt by the 
hands of an ungrateful bishop, he was led by his tri- 
„„„ umnhant son, Lothaire, through the streets of 

A.rt. S33. l ' & 

Aix-la-Chapelle. But natural feeling was not 



DEATH OF LOUIS. 201 

extinguished in the hearts of the staring populace. 
They saw in the meek emperor's lowly behaviour, and 
patient endurance of pain and insult, an image of that 
other and holier King who carried his cross up the 
steeps of Jerusalem. They saw him denuded of the 
symbols of earthly power and of military rank, op- 
pressed and wronged — and recognised in that down- 
trodden man a representation of themselves. This senti- 
ment spread with the magic force of sympathy and re- 
morse. All the world, we are told, left the unnatural 
son solitary and friendless in the very hour of his suc- 
cess; and Louis, too pure-minded himself to perceive 
that it was the virtue of his character which made him 
hated, persisted in pushing on his amendments as if he 
had the power to carry them into effect. He ordered all 
lands and other goods which the nobles had seized from 
the Church to be restored — a tenderness of conscience 
utterly inexplicable to the marauding baron, who had 
succeeded by open force, and in a fair field, in despoiling 
the marauding bishop of land and tower. It was arming 
his rival, he thought, with a two-edged sword, this 
silence as to the inroads of the churchman on the pro- 
perty of the nobles, and prevention of their just reprisals 
on the property of the prelate, by placing it under the 
safeguard of religion. The rugged warrior kept firm 
hold of the bishopric or abbey he had secured, and the 
belted bishop reimbursed himself by appropriating the 
wealth of his weaker neighbours. 

.But Louis was as unfortunate in his testamentary 
arrangement as in all the other regulations of his life. 
Lothaire was to retain the eastern portion of the empire ; 
Charles, his favourite, had France as far as the Ehine ; 
while Louis was limited to the distant region of Bavaria. 
And having made this disposition of his power, 
the meek and useless Louis descended into the 



202 NINTH CENTURY. 

tomb — a striking example, the French historians tell 
us, of the great historic truth renewed at such distant 
dates, that the villanies and cruelties of a race of kings 
bring misery on the most virtuous of their descendants. 
All the crimes of the three preceding reigns — the violence 
and disregard of life exhibited by Charlemagne himself 
— found their victim and expiation in his meek and 
gentle-minded son. The harshness of Henry VIII. of 
England, they add, and the despotic claims of James, 
were visited on the personally just and amiable Charles; 
and they point to the parallel case of their own Louis 
XVI., and see in the sad fortune of that mild and guile- 
less sovereign the final doom of the murderous Charles 
IX., and the voluptuous and hypocritical Louis XIV. 
But these kings are still far off in the darkness of the 
coming centuries. It is a strange sight, in the middle 
of the ninth century, to see the successor of the great 
Emperor stealing through the confused and chaotic 
events of that wretched period, stripped as it were of 
sword and crown, but everywhere displaying the beauty 
of pure and simple goodness. He refused to condemn 
his enemies to death. He was only inexorable towards 
his own offences, and sometimes humbled himself for 
imaginary sins. A protector of the Church, a zealous 
supporter of Rome, it would give additional dignity to 
the act of canonization if the name of Louis the Debon- 
naire were added to the list of Saints. 

But we have left the empire which it had taken so 
long to consolidate, now legally divided into three. 
There is a Charles in possession of the western division ; 
a Louis in the farther Germany; and Lothaire, the un- 
filial triumph er at Aix-la-Chapelle, invested with the 
remainder of the Eoman world. But Lothaire was not 
to be satisfied with remainders. Once in power, he was 
determined to recover the empire in its undivided state. 



FRANCE LOSES THE RHINE. 203 

He was King of Italy; master of Eome and of the 
Pope; lie was eldest grandson of Charlemagne, and 
defied the opposition of his brothers. A battle 
was fonght at Fontenay in 842, in which these 
pretensions were overthrown ; and the final severance 
took place in the following year between the French 
and German populations. The treaty between the 
brothers still remains. It is written in duplicate — ono 
in a tongue still intelligible to German ears, and the 
other in a Eomanized speech, which is nearer the French 
of the present day than the English of Alfred, or even 
of Edward the Confessor, is to ours. 

France, which had hitherto attained that title in right 
of its predominant race, held it henceforth on 
the double ground of language and territory. 
But there is a curious circumstance connected with tho 
partition of the empire, which it may be interesting to 
remember. France, in gaining its name and language, 
lost its natural boundary of the Ehine. Up to this time, 
the limit of ancient Gaul had continued to define the 
territory of the Western Franks. In rude times, indeed, 
there can be no other divisions than those supplied by 
nature ; but now that a tongue was considered a bond 
of nationality, the French were contented to surrender 
to Lothaire the Emperor a long strip of territory, 
running the whole way up from Italy to the North Sea, 
including both banks of the Ehine, and acting as a wall 
of partition between them and the German-speaking 
people on the other side, — a great price to pay, even for 
the easiest and most widely-spread language in Europe. 
Yet the most ambitious of Frenchmen would pause 
before he undid the bargain and reacquired the " exult- 
ing and abounding river" at the sacrifice of his inimitable 
tongue. 

Very confused and uncertain are all the events for a 



204 NINTH CENTURY. 

long time after this date. We see perpetual attempts 
made to restore the reality as well as the name of the 
Empire. These battles and competitions of the line of 
Charlemagne are the subject of chronicles and treaties, 
and might impose upon us by the grandeur of their ap- 
pearance, if we did not see, from the incidental facts 
which come to the surface, how unavailing all efforts 
must be to arrest the dissociation of state from state. 
The principle of dissolution was at work everywhere. 
Kingship itself had fallen into contempt, for the great 
proprietors had been encouraged to exert a kind of per- 
sonal power in the reign of Charlemagne, which con- 
tributed to the strength of his well-consolidated crown ; 
but when the same individual influence was exercised 
under the nominal supremacy of Louis the Debonnaire 
or Charles the Bald, it proved a humiliating and danger- 
ous contrast to the weakness of the throne. A combi- 
nation of provincial dignitaries could at any time out- 
weigh the authority of the king, and sometimes, even 
singly, the owners of extensive estates threw off the 
very name of subject. They claimed their lands as not 
only hereditary possessions, but endowed with all the 
rights and privileges which their personal offices had 
bestowed. If their commission from the emperor had 
given them authority to judge causes, to raise taxes, or 
to collect troops, they maintained from henceforth that 
those high powers were inherent in their lands. The 
dukes, therefore, invested their estates with ducal 
rights, independent of the Crown, and left to the holder 
of the kingly name no real authority except in his own 
domains. Brittany, and Aquitaine, and Septimania, 
withdrew their allegiance from the poor King of France. 
He could not compel the ambitious owners of those 
duchies to recognise his power, and condescended even 
to treat them as rival and acknowledged kings. Then 



FORGED DONATIONS. 205 

there were other magnates who were not to be left mere 
subjects when dukes had risen to such rank. So the 
Marquises of Toulouse and G-othia, a district of Languc- 
doc, and Auvergne, were treated more as equals than as 
appointed deputies recallable at pleasure. But worse 
enemies of kingly dignity than duke or marquis were 
the ambitious bishops, who looked with uneasy eyes on 
the rapid rise of their rivals the lay nobility. Already 
the hereditary title of those territorial potentates was an 
accomplished fact; the son of the count inherited his 
father's county. But the general celibacy of the clergy 
fortunately prevented the hereditary transmission of 
bishopric and abbey. To make up for the want of this 
advantage, they boldly determined to assert far higher 
claims as inherent in their rank than marquis or count 
could aim at. Starting from the universally-conceded 
ground of their right to reprimand and punish any 
Christian who committed sin, they logically carried 
their pretension to the right of deposing kings if they 
offended the Church. More than fifty years had passed 
since Charlemagne had received the imperial crown from 
the hands of the Pope of Eome. Dates are liable to fall 
into confusion in ignorant times and places, and it was 
easy to spread a belief that the popes had always ex- 
ercised the power of bestowing the diadem upon kings. 
To support these astounding claims with some certain 
guarantee, and give them the advantage of prescriptive 
right by a long and legitimate possession, certain docu- 
ments were spread abroad at this time, purporting to be 
a collection by Isidore, a saint of the sixth century, of 
the decretals or judicial sentences of the popes from a 
very early period, asserting the unquestioned spiritual 
supremacy of the Eoman See at a date when it was in 
reality but one of many feeble seats of Christian author- 
ity ; and to equalize its earthly grandeur with its re- 

18 



206 



NINTH CENTURY. 



ligious pretension, the new edition of Isidore cc vl P ts 
a donation by Constantine himself, in the begini ^ ' ji 
the fourth century, of the city of Eome and enormous 
territories in Italy, to be held in sovereignty by the 
successors of St. Peter. These are now universally 
acknowledged to be forgeries and impostures of tho 
grossest kind, but at the time they appeared they served 
the purpose for which they were intended, and gave a 
sanction to the Papal assumptions far superior to the 
rights of any existing crown. 

Charles the Bald was a true son of Louis the Debon- 
ocn naire in his devotion to the Church. When the 

a.d. 859. 

bishops of his own kingdom, with Wenilon of 
Sens as their leader, offended with some remissness he 
had temporarily shown in advancing their worldly in- 
terests, determined to depose him from the throne, and 
called Louis the German to take his place, Charles fled 
and threw himself on the protection of the Pope. And 
when by submission and promises he had been permitted 
to re-enter France, he complained of the conduct of the 
prelates in language which ratified all their claims. 
"Elected by "Wenilon and the other bishops, as well as 
by the lieges of our kingdom, who expressed their con- 
sent b}^ their acclamations, Wenilon consecrated mo 
king according to ecclesiastic tradition, in his own dio- 
cese, in the Church of the Holy Cross at Orleans. Ho 
anointed me with the holy oil; he gave me the diadem 
and royal sceptre, and seated me on the throne. After 
that consecration I could not be removed from the 
throne, or supplanted by any one, at least without being 
heard and judged by the bishops, by whose ministry I 
was consecrated king. It is they who are as the thrones 
of the Divinity. God reposes upon them, and by them 
he gives forth his judgments. At all times I have been 
ready to submit to their fatherly corrections, to their 



BELIEF AND INQUIRY. 207 

thcr gations, and am ready to do so still." What 
mOi ild the Church require? Its wealth was the 

least of its advantages, though the abbacies and bishop- 
rics were richer than dukedoms all over the land. Their 
temporal power was supported by the terrors of their 
spiritual authority -, and kings, princes, and people ap- 
peared so prone to the grossest excesses of credulity and 
superstition, that it needed little to throw Europe itself 
at the feet of the priesthood, and place sword and sceptre 
permanently in subordination to the crozier. Blindly 
secure of their position, rioting in the riches of the sub- 
ject land, the bishops probably disregarded, as below 
their notice, the two antagonistic principles which were 
at work at this time in the midst of their own body — 
the principle of absolute submission to authority in 
articles of faith, and the principle of free inquiry into all 
religious doctrine. The first gave birth to the great 
mystery of tran substantiation, which now first made its 
appearance as an indispensable belief, and was hailed by 
the laity and inferior clergy as a crowning proof of the 
miraculous powers inherent in the Church. The second 
was equally busy, but was not productive of such per- 
manent effects. At the court of Charles the Bald there 
was a society of learned and ingenious men, presided 
over by the celebrated John Scot Erigena, (or native of 
Ireland,) who had studied the early Fathers and the 
Platonic philosophy, and were inclined to admit human 
reason to some participation in the reception of Chris- 
tian truths. There were therefore discussions on the 
real presence, and free-will, and predestination, which 
had the usual unsatisfactory termination of all questions 
transcending man's understanding, and only embittered 
their respective adherents without advancing the settle- 
ment on either side. While these exercitations of talent 
and dialectic quickness were carried on, filling the different 



208 NINTH CENTURY. 

dioceses with wonder and perplexity, the great body of 
the people in various countries of Europe were recalled 
to the practical business of life by disputes of a far more 
serious character than the wordy wars of Scotus and his 
foes. Michelet, the most picturesque of the recent his- 
torians of France, has given us an amazing view of the 
state of affairs at this time. It is the darkest period 
of the human mind ; it is also the most unsettled period 
of human society. Outside of the narrowing limits of 
peopled Christendom, enemies are pressing upon every 
side. Saxons on the East are laying their hands in 
reverence on the manes of horses, and swearing in the 
name of Odin; Saracens, in the South and West, are 
gathering once more for the triumph of the Prophet ; 
and suddenly France, Germany, Italy, and England, are 
awakened to the presence and possible supremacy of a 
more dreaded invader than either, for the Vikingcr, or 
Norsemen, were abroad upon the sea, and all Christen- 
dom was exposed to their ravages. Wherever a river 
poured its waters into the ocean, on the coast of Nar- 
bonne, or Yorkshire, or Calabria, or Friesland, boats, 
small in size, but countless in number, penetrated into 
the inland towns, and disembarked wild and fearless 
warriors, who seemed inspired by the mad fanaticism 
of some inhuman faith, which made charity and mercy 
a sin. Starting from the islands and rugged mainland 
of the present Denmark and Norway, they swept across 
the stormy North Sea, shouting their hideous songs of 
glory and defiance, and springing to land when they 
reached their destination with the agility and blood- 
thirstiness of famished wolves. Their business was to 
carry slaughter and destruction wherever they went. 
They looked with contempt on the lazy occupations of 
the inhabitants of town or farm, and, above all, were 
filled with hatred and disdain of the monks and priests. 



THE NORSEMEN. 209 

Their leaders were warriors and poets. Gliding up 
noiseless streams, they intoned their battle-cry and 
shouted the great deeds of their ancestors when they 
reached the walls of some secluded monastery, and 
rejoiced in wrapping all its terrified inmates in flames. 
Bards, soldiers, pirates, buccaneers, and heathens, desti- 
tute of fear, or pity, or remorse, amorous of danger, 
and skilful in management of ship and weapon, these 
were the most ferocious visitants which Southern Europe 
had ever seen. JSTo storm was sufficient to be a protec- 
tion against their approach. On the crest of the highest 
waves those frail barks were seen by the affrighted 
dwellers on the shore, careering with all sail set, and 
steering right into their port. All the people on the 
coast, from the Ehine to Bayonne, and from Toulouse 
to the Grecian Isles, fled for protection to the great pro- 
prietors of the lands. But the great proprietors of the 
lands were the peaceful priors of stately abbeys, and 
bishops of wealthy sees. Their pretensions had been 
submitted to by kings and nobles ; they were the real 
rulers of France ; and even in England their authority 
was very great. Excommunications had been their 
arms against recusant baron and refractory count ; but 
the Danish Northmen did not care for bell, book, and 
candle. The courtly circle of scholars and divines could 
give no aid to the dishoused villagers and trembling 
cities, however ingenious the logic might be which re- 
conciled Plato to St. Paul; and Charles the Bald, sur- 
prised, no doubt, at the inefiicacy of prayers and proces- 
sions, was forced to replace the influence in the hands, 
not which carried the crozier and cross, but which 
curbed the horse and couched the spear. The invasion 
of the Danes was, in fact, the resuscitation of the courage 
and manliness of the nationalities they attacked. Dread- 
ful as the suffering was at the time, it was not given to 
18* 



210 NINTH CENTURY. 

any man then alive to see the future benefits contained 
in the present woe. We, with a calmer view, look back 
upon the whole series of those events, and in the inter- 
mixture of the new race perceive the elements of great- 
ness and power. Priest-ridden, down-trodden popula- 
tions received a fresh impulse from those untamed 
children of the North ; and in the forcible relegation of 
ecclesiastics to the more peaceable offices of their calling, 
we see the first beginning of the gradation of ranks, and 
separation of employments, which gave honourable oc- 
cupation to the respective leaders in Church and State ; 
which limited the clergyman to the unostentatious dis- 
charge of his professional duties, and left the baron to 
command his warriors and give armed protection to all 
the dwellers in the land. For feudalism, as understood 
in the Middle Ages, was the inevitable result of the re- 
lative positions of priest and noble at the time of the 
Norsemen's forays. It was found that the possession 
of great domains had its duties as well as its rights, and 
the duty of defence was the most imperative of all. 
Men held their grounds, therefore, on the obligation of 
keeping their vassals uninjured by the pirates; the 
bishops were found unable to perform this work, and the 
territory passed away from their keeping. Vast estates, 
no doubt, still remained in their possession, but they 
were placed in the guardianship of the neighbouring 
chateaux; and though at intervals, in the succeeding 
centuries, we shall see the prelate dressing himself in a 
coat of mail, and rendering in person the military ser- 
vice entailed upon his lands, the public feeling rapidly 
revolted against the incongruity of the deed. The steel- 
clad bishop was looked on with slender respect, and was 
soon found to do more damage to his order, by the con- 
trast between his conduct and his profession, than he 
could possibly gain for it by his prowess or skill in war. 



DEVELOPMENT OF FEUDALISM. 211 

Feudalism, indeed, or the reciprocal obligation of pro- 
tection and submission, reached its full development by 
the formal deposition of a descendant of Charlemagne, 
on the express ground of his inability to defend his 
people from the enemies by which they were 
surrounded. A congress of six archbishops, and 
seventeen bishops, was held in the town of Mantela, near 
Yienne; and after consultation with the nobility, they 
came to the following resolution: — "That whereas the 
great qualities of the old mayors of the palace were 
their only rights to the throne, and Charlemagne, 
whom all willingly obeyed, did not transmit his talents, 
along with his crown, to his posterity, it was right to 
leave that house." They therefore sent an offer of the 
throne of Burgundy to Boso, Count of the Ardennes, 
with the conditions " that he should be a true patron 
and defender of high and low, accessible and friendly to 
all, humble before G-od, liberal to the Church, and true 
to his word." 

By this abnegation of temporal weapons, and depend- 
ence on the armed warrior for their defence, the pre- 
lates put themselves at the head of the unarmed peoples 
at the same moment that they exercised their spiritual 
authority over all classes alike. It was useless for them 
to draw the sword themselves, when they regulated 
every motion of the hand by which the sword was held. 
While this is the state of affairs on the Continent — 
while the great Empire of Charlemagne is falling to 
pieces, and the kingly office is practically reduced to a 
mere equality with the other dignities of the land — while 
this disunion in nations and weakness in sovereigns is 
exposing the fairest lands in Europe to the aggressions 
of enemies on every side — let us cast our eyes for a 
moment on England, and see in what condition our 
ancestors are placed at the middle of this century. A 



212 NINTH CENTURY. 

most dreadful and alarming condition as ever Old England 
was in. For many years before this, a pirate's boat or 
two from the North would run upon the sand, and send 
the crews to burn and rob a village on the coast of Ber- 
wick or Northumberland. Pirates we superciliously 
call them, but that is from a misconception of their 
point of honour, and of the very different estimate they 
themselves formed of their pursuits and character. They 
were gentleman, perhaps, " of small estate" in some out- 
lying district of Denmark or Norway, but endowed 
with stout arms and a great wish to distinguish them- 
selves — if the distinction could be accompanied with an 
increase of their worldly goods. They considered the 
sea their own domain, and whatever was found on it as 
theirs by right of possession. They were, therefore, 
lords of the manor, looking after their rights, their 
waifs and strays, their flotsams and jetsams. They 
were also persons of a strong religious turn, and united 
the spirit of the missionary to the courage of the warrior 
and the avidity of the conqueror. Odin was still their 
god, the doors of the Walhalla were still open to them 
after death, and the skulls of their enemies were foam- 
ing with intoxicating mead. The English were rene- 
gades from the true faith, a set of drivelling wretches 
who believed in a heaven where there was no beer, and 
worshipped a god who bade them pray for their enemies 
and bless the very people who used them ill. The re- 
maining similarity in the language of the two peoples 
must have added a bitterness to the contemptuous feel- 
ings of the unreclaimed rovers of the deep ; and pro- 
bably, on their return, these enterprising warriors were 
as proud of the number of priests they had slain, as of 
the more valuable trophies they carried home. Den- 
mark itself, up to this time, had been distracted with 
internal wars. It was only the more active spirits who 



DANISH INVASION OF ENGLAND. 213 

had rushed across from the Sound, and solaced them- 
selves, in the intervals of their own campaigns, with an 
onslaught upon an English town. But now the scene 
was to change. The inroads of separate crews were to 
lu, be exchanged for national invasions. Harold of 

A.D. 838. & 

the Fair Hair was seated on an undisputed throne, 
and repressed the outrages of these adventurous warriors 
by a strong and determined will. He stretched his 
sceptre over all the Scandinavian world, and neither the 
North Sea nor the Baltic were safe places for piracy 
and spoil. One of his countrymen had founded the royal 
line of Eussia, and from his capital of Kieff or Novgorod 
was civilizing, with whip and battle-axe, the original 
hordes which now form the Empire of the Czars. Al- 
ready, from their lurking-places on the shores of the 
Black Sea, the Norwegian predecessors of the men of 
Odessa and Sebastopol were threatening a dash upon 
Constantinople; while sea-kings and jarls, compelled to 
be quiet and peaceable at home, but backed by all the 
wild populations of the North, anxious for glory, and 
greedy of gold and corn, resolved to reduce England 
to their obedience, and collected an enormous fleet in the 
quiet recesses of the Baltic, withdrawn from the obser- 
vation of Harold. It seems fated that France is always, 
in some sort or other, to set the fashion to her neighbours. 
We have seen, at the beginning of this century, how 
England followed the example of the Frankish peoples 
in consolidating itself into one dominion. Charlemagne 
was recognised chief potentate of many states, and 
Egbert was sovereign of all the Saxon lands, from Corn- 
wall to the gates of Edinburgh. But the model was 
copied no less closely in the splitting-up of the central 
authority than in its consolidation. While Louis the 
Debonnaire and Charles the Bald were weakening the 
throne of Charlemagne, the states of Egbert became 



214 



NINTH CENTURY. 



parcelled out in the same way between the descendants 
of the English king. Ethelwolf was the counterpart of 
Louis, and carried the sceptre in too gentle a hand. He 
still further diminished his authority by yielding to the 
dissensions of his court. Like the Frankish ruler, also, 
he left portions of his territory to his four sons; of 
whom it will be sufficient for us to remember that the 
youngest was the great Alfred — the foremost name in 
all mediaeval history; and by an injudicious marriage 
with the daughter of Charles the Bald, and his unjust 
divorce of the mother of all his sons, he offended the 
feelings of the nation, and raised the animosity of his 
children. Ethelbald his son completed the popular dis- 
content by marrying his father's widow, the French 
princess, who had been the cause of so much disagree- 
ment; and while the people were thus alienated, and the 
guiding hand of a true ruler of men was withdrawn, 
- the terrible invasion of Danes and Jutlanders 

A.©. 839. 

went on. They sailed up the Thames and pil- 
laged London. Winchester was given to the flames. 
The whole isle of Thanet was seized and permanently 
occupied. The magic standard, a raven, embroidered 
by the daughters of the famous Regner Lodbrog, (who 
had been stung to death by serpents in a dungeon into 
which he was thrown by Ella, King of Northumberland,) 
was carried from point to point, and was thought to be 
the symbol of victory and revenge. The offending 
Northumbrian now felt the wrath of the sons of Lod- 
brog. They landed with a great army, and after a 
battle, in which the chiefs of the English were slain, 
took the Northumbrian kingdom. Nottingham was 
soon after captured and destroyed. It was no longer a 
mere incursion. The nobles and great families of Den- 
mark came over to their new conquest, and stationed 
themselves in strong forti'esses, commanding large cir- 



ALFRED AND THE DANES. 215 

cles of country, and lived under their Danish regula- 
tions. The land, to be sure, was not populous at that 
time, and probably the Danish settlements were accom- 
plished without the removal of any original occupiers. 
But the castles they built, and the towns which rapidly 
grew around them, acted as outposts against the remain- 
ing British kingdoms; and at last, when fleet after fleet 
disembarked their thousands of warlike colonists 
' — when Leicester, Lincoln, Stamford, York, and 
Chester, were all in Danish hands, and stretched a line 
of intrenchments round the lands they considered their 
own — the divided Anglo-Saxons were glad to purchase a 
cessation of hostilities by guaranteeing to them forever 
the places and territories they had secured. And there 
was now a Danish kingdom enclosed by the fragments 
of the English empire; there were Danish laws and 
customs, a Danish mode of pronunciation, and for a 
good while a still broader gulf of demarcation established 
between the peoples by their diversity in religious 
faith. But when Alfred attained the supreme 
power — and although respecting the treaties between 
the Danes and English, j^et evidently able to defend his 
countrymen from the aggressions of their foreign neigh- 
bour — the pacified pirate, tired of the sea, and softened 
by the richer soil and milder climate of his new home, 
began to perceive the very unsatisfactory nature of his 
ancient belief, and rapidly gave his adhesion to the 
lessons of the gospel. G-uthrum, the Danish chieftain, 
became a zealous Christian according to his lights, and 
was baptized with all his subjects. Alfred acted as god- 
father to the neophyte, and restrained the wildest of his 
followers within due bounds. Perhaps, even, he was 
assisted by his Christianized allies in the great and final 
struggle against Hastings and a new swarm of Scandi- 
navian rovers, whose defeat is the concluding act of this 



216 



NINTH CENTURY. 



tumultuous century. Alfred drew up near London, and 
met the advancing hosts on the banks of the river Lea, 
about twenty miles from town. The patient angler in 
that suburban river seldom thinks what great events 
occurred upon its shore. Great ships — all things are 
comparative — were floating upon its waters, filled with 
armed Danes. Alfred cut certain openings in the banks 
and lowered the stream, so that the hostile navy stranded. 
Out sprang the Danes, astonished at the interruption to 
their course, and retreated across the country, nor 
stopped till they had placed themselves in inaccessible 
positions on the Severn. But the century came to a 
close. Opening with the great days of Charlemagne, it 
is right that it should close with the far more glorious 
reign of Alfred the patriot and sage; — a century illumi- 
nated at its two extremes, but in its middle period dark 
with disunion and ignorance, and not unlikely, unless 
controlled to higher uses, to give birth to a state of more 
hopeless barbarism than that from which the nations of 
Europe had so recently emerged. 



TENTH CENTURY. 



SSmpetors of <&ermanp. 

(cont.) 



A.D. 



Louis IV. 
911. Conrad. 
920. Henry the Fowler. 
936. Otho the Great. 
973. Otho II. 
983. Otho III. 



l&tngs of ^France* 

Charles the Simple. — 
(cont.) 
923. Kodolph. 
936. Louis IV., (d'Outremer.) 

954. LOTHAIRE. 

986. Louis V., (le Faineant.) 

987. Hugh Capet, (new dy- 

nasty.) 

996. EOBERT THE WlSE. 



iEmperors of tjje lEast. 

A.D. 

Leo. — (cont.) 

911. CONSTANTINE IX. 

915. Constantine and Eomanus. 
959. Komanus II. 
963. Nicephorus Phocas. 
969. John Zimisces. 

975. Basilius and Constan- 

tine X. 

IKmgs of ISnglanti. 

Alfred. — (cont.) 
901. Edward the Elder. 
925. Athelstane. 
941. Edmund I. 
948. Eldred. 
955. Edwy. 
959. Edgar. 

976. Edward II. 
978. Ethelred II. 



&tttf)or0* 

Suidas, (Lexicographer), Gerbert, Odo, Dunstan. 



19 



THE TENTH CENTURY. 

DARKNESS AND DESPAIR. 

The tenth century is always to be remembered as the 
darkest and most debased of all the periods of modern 
history. It was the midnight of the human mind, far 
out of reach of the faint evening twilight left by Roman 
culture, and further still from the morning brightness of 
the new and higher civilization. If we try to catch any 
hope of the future, we must turn from the oppressed 
and enervated populations of France and Italy to the 
wild wanderers from the North. By following the 
latter detachment of Norsemen who made their settle- 
ments on the Seine, we shall see that what seemed the 
wedge by which the compactness of an organized king- 
dom was to be split up turned out to be the strengthen- 
ing beam by which the whole machinery of legal go- 
vernment had been kept together. Romanized Gauls, 
effeminated Franks, G-oths, and Burgundians, were found 
unfitted for the duties either of subjects or rulers. They 
were too ambitious to obey, and too ignorant to com- 
mand. Religion itself had lost its efficacy, for the popu- 
lations had been so fed with false legends, that they had 
no relish for the truths of the gospel, which, indeed, as 
an instrument of instruction, had fallen into complete 
disuse. Ship-loads of false relics, and army-rolls of 
imaginary saints, were poured out for the general vene- 
ration. The higher dignitaries of the Church were 
looked on with very different feelings, according to the 
point of view taken of them. When regarded merely 

219 



220 TENTH CENTURY. 

as possessors of lands and houses, they were loved or 
hated according to the use they made of their power; 
but at the very time when cruelties and vices made them 
personally the objects of detestation or contempt, the 
sacredness of their official characters remained. Peti- 
tions were sent to the kings against the prelates being 
allowed to lead their retainers into battle, not entirely 
from a scruple as to the unlawfulness of such a proceed- 
ing, but from the more serious consideration that their 
death or capture would be taken as a sign of the venge- 
ance of Heaven, and damp the ardour of the party they 
supported. Churches and cathedrals were filled with 
processionary spectacles, and their altars covered with 
the offerings of the faithful; and yet so brutal were the 
manners of the times, and so small the respect enter- 
tained for the individual priest, that laymen of the 
highest rank thought nothing of knocking down the 
dignitaries of the Church with a blow on the head, even 
while solemnly engaged in the offices of devotion. The 
Eoman pontiffs, we have seen, did not scruple to avail 
themselves of the forgeries of their enthusiastic sup- 
porters to establish their authority on the basis of anti- 
quity, and at the middle of this century we should find, 
if we inquired into it, that the sacred city and chair of 
St. Peter were a prey to the most violent passions. 
Many devout Eoman Catholics have been, at various 
periods, so horrified with the condition of their chiefs, 
and of the perverted religion which had arisen from 
tradition and imposture, that they have claimed the 
mere continued existence of the Papacy as a proof of 
its Divine institution, and a fulfilment of the prophecy 
that " the gates of hell should not prevail against it." 
Yet even in the midst of this corruption and ignorance, 
there were not wanting some redeeming qualities, which 
soften our feelings towards the ecclesiastic power. It 



CONVENTS. 221 

was at all times, in its theory, a protest against the 
excesses of mere strength and violence. The doctrines 
it professed to teach were those of kindness and charity; 
and in the great idea of the throned fisherman at Rome, 
the poorest saw a kingdom which was not of this world, 
and yet to which all the kingdoms of this world must 
bow. Temporal ranks were obliterated when the de- 
scendants of kings and emperors were seen paying 
homage to the sons of serfs and workmen. The immu- 
nity, also, from spoil and slaughter, which to a certain 
extent still adhered to episcopal and abbatial lands, re- 
fleeted a portion of their sanctity on the person of the 
bishop and abbot. Mysterious reverence still hung 
round the convents, within which such ceaseless prayers 
were said and so many relics exposed, and whither it 
was also known that all the learning and scholarship of 
the land had fled for refuge. The doles at monastery- 
doors, however objected to by political economists, as 
encouragements of mendicancy and idleness, were viewed 
in a very different light by the starving crowds, who, 
besides being qualified by destitution and hunger for the 
reception of charitable food, had an incontestable right, 
under the founder's will, to be supported by the establish- 
ment on whose lands they lived. The abbot who neg- 
lected tofeed the poor was not only an unchristian con- 
temner of the precepts of the faith, but ran counter to the 
legal obligations of his place. He was administrator of 
certain properties left for the benefit of persons about 
whose claims there was no doubt ; and when the rapa- 
cious methods of maintaining their adherents, which 
were adopted by the count and baron, were compared 
with the baskets of broken victuals, and the jugs of 
foaming beer, which were distributed at the buttery of 
the abbey, the decision was greatly in favour of the 
spiritual chief. His ambling mule, and swift hound, and 

19* 



222 TENTH CENTURY. 

hooded hawks, were not grudged, nor his less defensible 
occupations seriously inquired into, as long as the beef 
and mutton were not stinted, and the liquor flowed in 
reasonable streams. As to his theological tenets, or 
knowledge of history, either sacred or profane, the 
highest ecclesiastic was on the same level of utter igno- 
rance and indifference with the lowest of his serfs. 
There were no books of controversial divinity in all this 
century. There were no studies exacted from priest or 
prelate. All that was required was an inordinate zeal 
in the discovery of holy relics, and an acquaintance with 
the unnumbered ceremonies performed in the celebra- 
tion of the service. Morals were in as low a state as 
learning. Debauchery, drunkenness, and uncleanness 
were the universal characteristics both of monk and 
secular. So it is a satisfaction to turn from the wretched 
spectacle of the decaying and corrupt condition of an 
old society, to the hardier vices of a new and undegene- 
rated people. Better the unreasoning vigour of the 
Normans, and their wild trust in Thor and Odin — their 
spirit of personal independence and pride in the manly 
exercises — than the creeping submission of an unedu- 
cated population, trampled on by their brutal lay supe- 
riors, and cheated out of money and labour by the 
artifices of their priests. 

Eollo, the Norman chief, had pushed his unresisted 
galleys up the Seine, and strongly intrenched himself 
in Eouen, in the first year of this century. From this 
citadel, so admirably selected for his purposes, whether 
of defence or conquest, he spread his expeditions on 
every side. The boats were so light that no shallowness 
of water hindered their progress even to the great 
valleys where the river was still a brook. When impe- 
diments were encountered on the way, in the form of 
waterfall, or, more rarely, of bridge or weir, the adven- 



NOKSE SETTLEMENTS. 223 

turers sprang to shore and carried their vessels along 
the land. When greater booty tempted them, they 
even crossed long tracts of country, hauling their boats 
along with them, and launching them in some peaceful 
vale far away from the sea. Every islet in the rivers 
was seized and fortified ; so that, dotted about over all 
the beautiful lands between the Seine and the borders 
of Flanders, were stout Norman colonies, with all the 
pillage they had obtained securely guarded in those un- 
assailable retreats, and ready to carry their maritime 
depredations wherever a canoe could swim. Their 
rapidity of locomotion was equal to that of the Saracenic 
hordes who had poured down from the Pyrenees in the 
days of Charles the Hammer. But the Norsemen were 
of sterner stuff than the light chivalry of Abclerach- 
man. Where they stopped they took root. They found 
it impossible to carry off all the treasure they had 
seized, and therefore determined to stay beside it. 
Eouen was at first about to be laid waste, but the policy 
of the bishop preserved it from destruction, while the 
wisdom of the rovers converted it into a fortress of the 
greatest strength. Strong walls were reared all round. 
The beautiful river was guarded night and day by their 
innumerable fleet, and in a short time it was recognised 
equally by friend and foe as the capital and headquarters 
of a new race. Nor were the Normans left entirely to 
Scandinavia for recruits. The glowing reports of their 
success, which successively arrived at their ancient 
homes, of course inspired the ambitious listeners with 
an irresistible desire to launch forth and share their 
fortune ; but there were not wanting thousands of volun- 
teers near at hand. King and duke, bishop and baron, 
were all unable to give protection to the cultivator of 
the soil and shepherd of the flock. These humble suf- 
ferers saw their cabins fired, and all their victuals de- 



2-4 TENTH CENTURY. 

stroyed. Eollo was too politic to make it a war of 
extermination against the unresisting inhabitants, and 
easily opened his ranks for their reception. The result 
was that, in those disastrous excursions, shouting the 
war-cry of Norway, and brandishing the pirate's axe, 
were many of the original Franks and Gauls, allured by 
the double inducement of escaping further injury them- 
selves and taking vengeance on their former oppressors. 
Religious scruples did not stand in their way. They 
gave in their adhesion to the gods of the North, and 
proved themselves true converts to Thor and Odin, by 
eating the flesh of a horse that had been slain in sacri- 
fice. It is perhaps this heathen association with horse- 
flesh as an article of food, which has banished it from 
Christian consumption for so long a time. But an effort 
is now made in France to rescue the fattened and roasted 
steed from the obloquy of its first introduction ; and the 
success of the movement would be complete if there 
were no other difficulty to contend against than the 
stigma of its idolatrous origin. Yet the recruits were 
not all on one side, for we read of certain sea-kings who 
have grown tired of their wandering life, and taken ser- 
vice under the kings of France. Of these the most 
famous was Hastings, whom we saw defeated at the end 
of the last century, on the banks of the river Lea. He is 
old now, and so far forgetful of his Scandinavian origin 
that some French annalists claim him as a countryman 
of their own, and maintain that he was the son of a 
husbandman near Troyes. He is now a great landed 
lord, Count of Chartres, and in high favour with the 
French king. When Eollo had established his forces on 
the banks of the Eure, one of the tributaries of the 
Seine, the ancient pirate went at the head of an embassy 
to see what the new-comer required. Standing on the 
farther bank of the little river, he raised his voice, and 



ROLLO. 225 

in good Norwegian demanded who they were, and who 
was their lord. "We have no lord!" they said: "we 
are all equal." " And why do you come into this land, 
and what are you going to do ?" " We are going to 
chase away the inhabitants, and make the country our 
home. But who are you, who speak our language so 
well?" The count replied, "Did you never hear of 
Hastings the famous pirate, who had so many ships 
upon the sea, and did such evil to this realm V " Of 
course," replied the Norsemen: "Hastings began well, 
but has ended poorly." "Have you no wish, then," 
said Hastings, " to submit yourselves to King Charles, 
who offers you land and honours on condition of fealty 
and service?" "Off! off! — we will submit ourselves to 
no man; and all we can take we shall keep, without 
dependence on any one. Go and tell the king so, if you 
like." Hastings returned from his unsuccessful embassy, 
and the attempt at compromise was soon after followed 
by a victory of Eollo, which decided the fate of the king- 
dom. The conquerors mounted the Seine, and laid siege 
to Paris ; but failing in this, they retraced their course to 
Eouen, and made themselves masters of Bayeux, and of 
other places. Eollo was now raised to supreme com- 
mand by the voices of his followers, and took rank as an 
independent chief. But he was too sagacious a leader to 
rely entirely on the favour or success of his countrymen. 
He protected the native population, and reconciled them 
to the absence of their ancient masters, by the increased 
security in life and property which his firmness pro- 
duced. He is said to have hung a bracelet of gold in an 
exposed situation, with no defence but the terror of his 
justice, and no one tried to remove it. He saw, also, that 
however much his power might be dreaded, and his 
family feared, by the great nobility of France with whom 
he was brought into contact, his position as a heathen and 
p 



226 TENTH CENTURY. 

isolated settler placed him in an inferior situation. The 
Archbishop of Bouen, who had been his ally in the 
peaceable occupation of the city, was beside him, with 
many arguments in favour of the Christian faith. The 
time during which the populations had been intermixed 
had smoothed many difficulties on either side. The 
worship of Thor and Odin was felt to be out of place in 
the midst of great cathedrals and wealthy monasteries, 
and it created no surprise when, in a few years, the 
ambitious Bollo descended from his proud independence, 
_,„ did suit and service to his feeble adversary 

A.D. 911. J 

Charles the Simple, and retained all his con- 
quests in full property as Duke of Normandy and Peer 
of France. 

Already the divinity that hedged a king placed the 
crown, even when destitute of real authority, at an im- 
measurable height above the loftiest of the nobles ; and 
it will be well to preserve this in our memory ; for to 
the belief in this mystical dignity of the sovereign, the 
monarchical principle was indebted for its triumph in 
all the states of Europe. No matter how powerless the 
anointed ruler might be — no matter how greatly a com- 
bination of vassals, or a single vassal, might excel him 
in men and money — the ineffable supremacy of the 
sacred head was never denied. This strange and en- 
nobling sentiment had not yet penetrated the mind of 
Eollo and his followers, at the great ceremonial of his 
reception as a feudatory of the Crown. He declined to 
bend the knee before his suzerain, but gave him his oath 
of obedience and faith, standing at his full height. 
When a stickler for court etiquette insisted on the final 
ceremony of kissing the foot of the feudal superior, the 
duke made a sign to one of his piratical attendants to 
go through the form instead of him. Forth stalked the 
Norseman towards the overjoyed Charles, and without 



FEUDALISM. 227 

stooping his body laid hold of the royal boot, and, lifting 
it with all his strength up to his mouth, upset the un- 
fortunate and short-legged monarch on his back, to the 
great consternation of his courtiers, and the hilarious 
enjoyment of his new subjects. But there was hence- 
forth a new element in French society. The wanderers 
were unanimously converted to Christianity, and the 
shores of the whole kingdom perpetually guarded from 
piratical invaders by the contented and warlike country- 
men of Hastings and Rollo. Normandy and Brittany 
were the appanage of the new duke, and perhaps they 
were more useful to the French monarch, as the well- 
governed territories of a powerful vassal, than if he had 
held them in full sovereignty in their former disorgan- 
ized and helpless state. Language soon began to exert 
its combining influence on the peoples thus brought into 
contact, and in a few years the rough Norse gave place 
to the Eomanized idiom of the rest of the kingdom, and 
the descendants of Eollo in the next generation required 
an interpreter if any of their relatives came to visit 
them from Denmark. 

But the true characteristic event of this century was 
the first establishment of real feudalism. The hereditary 
nature of lands and tenements had long been recog- 
nised; the original granter had long surrendered his 
right to reclaim the property on the death of the first 
possessor. Gradually also, and by sufferance, the offices 
to which, in the stronger periods of royalty, the favoured 
subjects had been promoted for life or a definite time 
were considered to belong to the descendant of the 
lolder. But it was only now, in the weak administra- 
tion of a series of nominal kings, that the rights and 
nivileges of a titular nobility were legally recognised, 
ind large portions of the monarchy forever conveyed 
iway from the control of the Crown. There is a sort 



228 TENTH CENTURY. 

of natural feudalism which must always exist where 
there are degrees of power and influence, and which is 
as potent at this moment as in the time we are describ- 
ing. A man who expects a favour owes and performs 
suit and service to the man who has the power of be- 
stowing it. A man with land to let, with money to 
lend, with patronage to exert, is in a sort of way the 
" superior" of him who wants to take the farm, or bor- 
row the money, or get the advancement. The obliga- 
tions of these positions are mutual ; and only very ad- 
vanced philosophers in the theory of disunion and in- 
gratitude would object to the reciprocal feelings of kind- 
ness and attachment they naturally produce. In a less 
settled state of society, such as that now existing, 01 
which lately existed, at the Cape of Good Hope and in 
New Zealand, the feudal principle is fresh and vigorous, 
though not recognised under that name, for the peaceful 
or weak are glad to pay deference and respect to th< 
wield er of the protective sword. In the tenth century 
there were customs, but no laws, for laws presuppose 
some external power able to enforce them, and the decay 
of the kingly authority had left the only practica 
government in the hands of the great and powerful. 
They gave protection in return for obedience. But 
when more closely inquired into, this assumption of 
authority by a nobility or upper class is found to have 
been purely defensive on the part of the lay proprietors, 
against the advancing tide of a spiritual Democracy, 
which threatened to submerge the whole of Europe. 
Already the bishops and abbots had got possession of 
nearly half the realm of France, and in other countries 
they were equally well provided. Those great officer: 
were the leaders of innumerable priests and monks, and 
owed their dignities to the popular will. The Pope 
himself — a sovereign prince when once placed in the 



RESISTANCE TO THE CHURCH. 229 

chair of St. Peter — was indebted for his exaltation to a 
plurality of votes of the clergy and people of Rome. 
Election was, in fact, the universal form of constituting 
the rule under which men were to live. But who were 
the electors ? The appointment was still nominally in 
the people, but the people were almost entirely under 
the influence of the clerical orders. Mechanics and 
labourers were the serfs or dependants of the rich 
monasteries, and tillers of the episcopal lands. The 
citizens had not yet risen into wealth or intelligence, 
and, though subject in their persons to the baron whose 
castle commanded their walls, they were still under the 
guidance of their priests. No middle class existed to 
hold the balance even between the nobility and the 
Church ; and the masses of the population were naturally 
disposed to throw power into the hands of persons who 
sprang, in most instances, from families no better than 
their own, and recommended themselves to popular 
favour by opposition (often just, but always domineering) 
to the proceedings of the lay aristocracy. The labour- 
ing serfs, who gave the vote, were not much inferior in 
education or refinement to the ordained serfs who can- 
vassed for their favour. Abbacies, priories, bishoprics, 
parochial incumbencies, and all cathedral dignities, were 
held by a body distinct from the feudal gentry, and 
elevated, mediately or immediately, by universal suf- 
frage. If some stop had not been put to the aggressions 
of the priesthood, all the lands in Christendom would 
have been absorbed by its insatiable greed — all the 
offices of the State would have been conveyed to sacer- 
dotal holders ; all kings would have been nominated by 
the clerical voice alone, and freedom and progress would 
never have had their birth. The monarchs — though it 
is almost mockery to call them so in England — were 
waging an unsuccessful war with the pretensions of St. 

20 



230 TENTH CENTURY. 

Dunstan, who was an embodiment of the pitiless harsh- 
ness and Mind ambition of a zealot for ecclesiastic 
supremacy. In France a succession of imbecile rulers, 
whose characters are clearly enough to be guessed from 
the descriptive epithets which the old chroniclers have 
attached to their names, had left the Crown a prey to 
all its enemies. What was to be expected from a 
series of governors whose mark in history is made by 
such nicknames as " The Bald/' " The Stammerer/ 
" The Fat," and finally, without circumlocution, " The 
Fool" ? Everybody tried to get as much out of the 
royal plunder as he could. Bishops got lands and 
churches. Foreign pirates, we have seen, got whole 
counties at a time, and in self-defence the nobility were 
forced to join in the universal spoil. Counties as large 
as Normandy were retained as rightful inheritances, in- 
dependent of all but nominal adhesion to the throne. 
Smaller properties were kept fast hold of, on the same 
pretence. And by this one step the noble was placed 
in a position of advantage over his rival the encroaching 
bishop. His power was not the mere creation of a vote 
or the possession of a lifetime. His family had founda- 
tions on which to build through a long succession of 
generations. Marriage, conquest, gift, and purchase, all 
tended to the consolidation of his influence; and the re- 
sult was, that, instead of one feeble and decaying poten- 
tate in the person of the king, to resist the aggressions 
of an absorbing and levelling Church, there were hun- 
dreds all over the land, democratic enough in regard to 
their dislike of the supremacy of the sovereign, but 
burning with a deep-seated aristocratic hatred of the 
territorial airorandizcment of the dissolute and low-born 
clergy. Europe was either in this century to be ruled 
by mailed barons or surpliced priests. Sometimes they 
played into each other's hands. Sometimes the warrior 



HUGH CAPET. 231 

overwhelmed an adversary by enlisting on his side the 
sympathies of the Church. Sometimes the Church, in 
its controversies with the Crown, cast itself on the pro- 
tection of the warrior, but more frequently it threw its 
weight into the scale of the vacillating monarch, who 
could reward it with such munificent donations. But 
those munificent donations were equivalent to aggressions 
on the nobles. There was no use in their trying to check 
the aggrandizement of the clerical power, if the Crown 
continued its gifts of territory and offices to the priests 
and churches. And at last, when the strong-handed 
barons of France were tired out with the fatuity of their 
effete kings, they gave the last proof of the supremacy 
they had attained, by departing from the line of Charle- 
magne and placing one of themselves upon the throne. 
Hugh Capet, the chief of the feudal nobles, was chosen 
to wear the crown as delegate and representative of the 
rest. The old Mayors of the Palace had been revived 
in his family for some generations ; and when Louis the 
son of Lothaire died, after a twelvemonth's permissive 
reign, in 987, the warriors and land-owners turned in- 
stinctively to the strongest and most distinguished 
member of their body to be the guardian of the privi- 
leges they had already secured. This was an aristocra- 
tic movement against the lineal supremacy of the Crown, 
and in reply to the "democratic policy of the Church. 
But the Pope was too clear-sighted to lose the chance of 
attaching another champion to the papal chair. He 

nofT made haste to ratify the new nomination to the 
a.d. 987. J 

throne, and pronounced Hugh Capet " King of 
France in right of his great deeds." 

Hugh Capet had been first of the feudal nobility; but 
from thenceforth he laboured to be "every inch a king." 
He tried to please both parties, and to humble them at 
the same time. He did not lavish crown-lands or lofty 



232 TENTH CENTURY. 

employments on the clergy; he took a new and very 
economical way of attaching them to his cause. He 
procured his election, it is not related by what means, 
to the highest dignities in the Church, and, although not 
in holy orders, was invested with the abbacies of St. 
Denis and St. Martin's and St. Germain's. The clergy 
were delighted with the increase to the respectability 
of their order, which had thus a king among its office- 
bearers. The Pope, we have seen, was first to declare 
his legitimacy; the bishops gave him their support, as 
they felt sure that, as a threefold abbot, he must have 
interests identical with their own. He was fortunate, 
also, in gaining still more venerated supporters; for 
while he was building a splendid tomb at St. Valery, 
the saint of that name appeared to him and said, with 
larger promise than the witches to Banquo, " Thou and 
thy descendants shall be kings to the # remotest genera- 
tions." 

With the nobles he proceeded in a different manner. 
His task, you will remember, was to regain the universal 
submission of the nation ; and success at first seemed 
almost hopeless, for his real power, like that of the 
weakest of his immediate predecessors, extended no 
further than his personal holdings. In his fiefs of 
France proper (the small district including Paris) and 
Burgundy he was all-powerful; but in the other princi- 
palities and dukedoms he was looked on merely as a 
neighbouring potentate with some shadowy claims of 
suzerainty, with no right of interference in their in- 
ternal administration. The other feudatories under the 
old monarchy, but who were in reality independent sove- 
reigns under the new, were the Dukes of Normandy and 
Flanders, and Aquitaine and Toulouse. These made the 
six lay peerages of the kingdom, and, with the six ecclesi- 
astical chief rulers, made the Twelve Peers of France. 



CORONATION OF CAPET. 233 

Of the lay peerages it will be seen that Hugh was in 
possession of two — the best situated and most populous 
of all. The extent of his possessions and the influence 
of his name were excellent starting-points in his efforts 
to restore the power of the Crown ; but other things 
were required, and the first thing he aimed at was to 
place his newly-acquired dignity on the same vantage- 
ground of hereditary succession as his dukedoms had 
long been. With great pomp and solemnity he himself 
was anointed with the holy oil by the hands of the 
Pope; and he took advantage of the self-satisfied secu- 
rity of the other nobles to have the ceremony of 
a coronation performed on his son during his 
lifetime, and by this arrangement the appearance of 
election was avoided at his death. Its due weight must 
be given to the universal superstition of the time, when 
we attribute such importance to the formal consecration 
of a king. Externals, in that age, were all in all. 
Something mystic and divine, as we have said before, 
was supposed to reside in the very fact of having the 
crown placed on the head with the sanction and prayers 
of the Church. Opposition to the wearer became not 
only treason, but impiety; and when the same policy 
was pursued by many generations of Hugh's successors, 
in always procuring the coronation of their heirs before 
their demise, and thus obliterating the remembrance of 
the elective process to which they owed their position, 
the royal power had the vast advantage of hereditary 
descent added to its unsubstantial but never-abandoned 
claim of paramount authority. The effects of this mo- 
mentous change in the dynasty of one of the great 
European nations were felt in all succeeding centuries. 
The family connection between the house of France 
and the Empire was dissolved ; and the struggle between 
the old condition of society and the rising intelligence 

20* 



234 TENTH CENTURY. 

of the peoples — which is the great characteristic of the 
Middle Ages — took a more defined form than before : 
aristocracy assumed its perfected shape of king and 
nobility combined for mutual defence on one side, and 
on the other the towns and great masses of the nations 
striving for freedom and privilege under the leadership 
of the sympathizing and democratic Church; for the 
Church was essentially democratic, in spite of the arro- 
gance and grasping spirit of some of its principal leaders. 
From hereditary aristocracy and hereditary royalty it 
was equally excluded; and the celibacy of the clergy 
has had this good effect, if no other : Its members were 
recruited from the people, and derived all their influence 
from popular support. In Germany the same process 
was going on, though without the crowning consumma- 
tion of making the empire non-elective. Otho, however 
— worthier of the name of Great than many who have 
borne that ambitious title — succeeded in limiting that 
highest of European dignities to the possessors of the 
„„„ German crown, and commenced the connection 

a.d. 962. ' 

between Upper Italy and the Emperors which 
still subsists (so uneasily for both parties) under the 
house of Austria. 

In England the misery of the population had reached 
its maximum. The immigration of the Norsemen had 
been succeeded by numberless invasions, accompanied 
with all the horrors of barbarism and religions hatred ; 
for the Danes who devastated the shores in this age 
were as remorselessly savage, and as bitterly heathen, 
as their predecessors a hundred years before. No place 
was safe for the unhappy Christianized Saxons. Their 
sufferings were of the same kind as those of the inha- 
bitants of Normandy when Eollo began his ravages. 
Their priest-ridden kings and impoverished nobles could 
give them no protection. Bribes were paid to the assail- 



GENERAL DEMORALIZATION. 235 

ants, and only brought over increasing and hungrier 
hordes. The land was a prey to wretchedness of every 
kind, and it was slender consolation to the starving and 
trampled multitudes that all the world was suffering to 
almost the same extent. Saracens were devastating the 
coasts of Italy, and a wild tribe of Sclaves trying to 
burst through the Hungarian frontier. At Rome itself, 
the capital of intellect and religion, such iniquities were 
perpetrated on every side that Protestant authors them- 
selves consent to draw a veil over them for the sake of 
human nature ; and in these sketches we require to do 
nothing more than allude to the crimes and wickedness 
of the papal court as one of the features by which the 
century was marked. Women of high rank and in- 
famous character placed the companions of their vices 
in the highest offices of the Church, and seated their 
sons or paramours on the papal throne. Spiritual pre- 
tensions rose almost in proportion to personal immorality, 
and the curious spectacle was presented of a power losing 
all respect at home by conduct which the heathen em- 
perors of the first century scarcely equalled j of popes 
alternately dethroning and imprisoning each other — 
sometimes of two popes at a time — always dependent 
for life or influence on the will of the emperor, or who- 
ever else might be dominant in Italy — and yet success- 
fully claiming the submission and reverence of distant 
nations as "Bishop of all the world" and lineal "succes- 
sors of the Prince of the Apostles." This claim had 
never been expressly made before, and is perhaps the 
most conclusive proof of the darkness and ignorance of 
this period. Men were too besotted to observe the incon- 
gruity between the life and profession of those blemishes 
of the Church, even when by travelling to the seat of 
government they had the opportunity of seeing the 
Roman pontiff and his satellites and patrons. The rest 



236 TENTH CENTURY. 

of the world had no means of learning the real state of 
affairs. Education had almost died out among the 
clergy themselves. Nobody else could write or read. 
Travelling monks gave perverted versions", we may be. 
lieve, of every thing likely to be injurious to the interests 
of the Church j and the result was, that everywhere 
beyond the city-walls the thunder of a Boniface the 
Seventh, or a John the Twelfth, was considered as good 
thunder as if it had issued from the virtuous indignation 
of St. Paul. 

But just as this century drew to a close, various cir- 
cumstances concurred to produce a change in men's 
minds. It was a universally-diffused belief that the 
world would come to an end when a thousand years 
from the Saviour's birth were expired. The year 999 
was therefore looked upon as the last which any one 
would see. And if ever signs of approaching dissolu- 
tion were shown in heaven and earth, the people of this 
century might be pardoned for believing that they were 
made visible to them. Even the breaking up of morals 
and law, and the wide deluge of sin which overspread 
all lands, might be taken as a token that mankind were 
deemed unfit to occupy the earth any more. In addi- 
tion to these appalling symptoms, famines were renewed 
from year to year in still increasing intensity and brought 
plague and pestilence in their train. The land was left 
un tilled, the house unrepaired, the right un vindicated; 
for who could take the useless trouble of ploughing or 
building, or quarrelling about a property, when so few 
months were to put an end to all terrestrial interests? 
Yet even for the few remaining days the multitudes 
must be fed. Robbers frequented every road, entered 
even into walled towns; and there was no authority left 
to protect the weak, or bring the wrong-doer to punish- 
ment. Corn and cattle were at length exhausted ; and 



FAMINE AND DESPAIR. 237 

in a great part of the Continent the most frightful ex- 
tremities were endured ; and when endurance could go 
no further, the last desperate expedient was resorted to, 
and human flesh was commonly consumed. One man 
went so far as to expose it for sale in a populous market- 
town. The horror of this open confession of their needs 
was so great, that the man was burned, but more for 
the publicity of his conduct than for its inherent guilt. 
Despair gave a loose to all the passions. Nothing was 
sacred — nothing safe. Even when food might have been 
had, the vitiated taste made bravado of its depravation, 
and women and children were killed and roasted in the 
madness of the universal fear. Meantime the gentler 
natures were driven to the wildest excesses of fanaticism 
to find a retreat from the impending judgment. Kings 
and emperors begged at monastery-doors to be admitted 
brethren of the Order. Henry of Germany and Eobert 
of France were saints according to the notions of the 
time, and even now deserve the respect of mankind for 
the simplicity and benevolence of their characters. 
Henry the Emperor succeeded in being admitted as a 
monk, and swore obedience on the hands of the gentle 
abbot who had failed in turning him from his purpose. 
" Sire/' he said at last, " since you are under my orders, 
and have sworn to obey me, I command you to go 
forth and fulfil the duties of the state to which God has 
called you. Go forth, a monk of the Abbey of St. Yanne, 
but Emperor of the West." Eobert of France, the son 
of Hugh Capet, placed himself, robed and crowned, 
among the choristers of St. Denis, and led the musicians 
in singing hymns and psalms of his own composition. 
Lower men were satisfied with sacrificing the marks of 
their knightly and seignorial rank, and placed baldrics 
and swords on the altars and before the images of saints. 
Some manumitted their serfs, and bestowed large sums 



238 TENTH CENTURY. 

upon charitable trusts, commencing their disposition 
with words implying the approaching end of all. 
Crowds of the common people would sleep nowhere 
but in the porches, or at any rate within the shadow, of 
the churches and other holy buildings; and as the day 
of doom drew nearer and nearer, greater efforts were 
made to appease the wrath of Heaven. Peace was pro- 
claimed between all classes of men. From Wednesday 
night till Monday evening of each week there was to be 
no violence or enmity or war in all the land. It was to 
be a Truce of God ; and at last, all their strivings after 
a better state, acknowledgments of a depraved condi- 
tion, and heartfelt longings for something better, purer, 
nobler, received their consummation, when, in the place 
of the unprincipled men who had disgraced Christianity 
by carrying vice and incredulity into the papal chair, 
there was appointed to the highest of ecclesiastical dig- 
nities a man worthy of his exaltation ; and the good and 
holy Gcrbert, the tutor, guide, and friend of Eobert of 
France, was appointed Pope in 998, and took the name 
of Sylvester the Second. 



ELEVENTH CENTURY. 



ISmperocs of (Hermans. ISmpenirg of tje IHast* 



A.D. 

Otho III. — (cont.) 
1002. Henry of Bavaria. 
1024. Conrad II. 
1039. Henrv III. 
1056. Henry IV. 



Xvings of ISitfllanfc. 

Ethelred II. — (cont.) 
1013. Sweyn. 
1015. Canute the (treat 
1017. Edmund II. 
1039. Harold and Hardi- 

CANUTE. 

1042. Edward the Confessor 

1066. Harold, (son of God- 
win.) 

1066. William the Conquer 
or. 

1087. William Rufus. 



a.d. 





Basilius. — (cont. ) 


1028. 


EOMANUS III. 


1042. 


Empress Zoe and Theo- 




dora. 


1056. 


Michael VI. 


1057. 


Isaac Comnenus. 


1059. 


CONSTANTINE X.,(D(JCAS.) 


1067. 


Eudoxia and Constan- 




TINE XI. 


1068. 


RomanusIV., (Diogenes.) 


1071. 


Michael. 


tn 

1 1078. 
1081. 


( Two Princes of the 


\ House of the Com- 


v neni. 


1081. 


Alexis I. 



Urngs of ^France- 

Robert the Wise. — - 
(cont.) 
1031. Henry I. 
1060. Philip I. 

1096. The First Crusade. 



Eutfjors* 

Anselm, (1003-1079,) Abelard, (1079-1142,) Berengarius, 
Roscelin, Lanfranc, Theophylact, (1077.) 



THE ELEVENTH CENTUKY. 

THE COMMENCEMENT OF IMPROVEMENT GREGORY THE 

SEVENTH FIRST CRUSADE. 

And now came the dreaded or hoped-for year. The 
awful Thousand had at last commenced, and men held 
their breath to watch what would be the result of its 
arrival. " And he laid hold of the dragon, that old ser- 
pent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him for 
a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit, 
and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should 
deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years 
should be fulfilled : and after that he must be loosed a 
little season." (Eevelation xx. 2, 3.) With this text 
all the pulpits in Christendom had been ringing for a 
whole generation. And not the pulpits only, but the re- 
fection-halls of convents, and the cottages of the starving 
peasantry. Into the castle also of the noble, we have 
seen, it had penetrated; and the most abject terror per- 
vaded the superstitious, while despair, as in shipwrecked 
vessels, displayed itself amid the masses of the popula- 
tion in rioting and insubordination. The spirit of evil 
for a little season was to be let loose upon a sinful 
world -, and when the observer looked round at the real 
condition of the people in all parts of Europe — at the 
ignorance and degradation of the multitude, the cruelty 
of the lords, and the unchristian ambition and unre- 
strained passions of the clergy — it must have puzzled 
him how to imagine a worse state of things even when 
the chain was loosened from "that old serpent," and 
Q 21 241 



242 ELEVENTH CENTURY. 

the world placed unresistingly in his folds. Yet, as if 
men's minds had now reached' their lowest point, there 
was a perpetual rise from the beginning of this date. 
When the first day of the thousand-and-first year shone 
upon the world, it seemed that in all nations the torpor 
of the past was to be thrown off. There were strivings 
everywhere after a new order of things. Coining events 
cast their shadows a long way before ; for in the very 
beginning of this century, when it was reported that 
Jerusalem had been taken by the Saracens, Sylvester 
uttered the memorable words, " Soldiers of Christ, arise 
and fight for Zion." By a combination of all Christian 
powers for one object, he no doubt hoped to put an end 
to the party quarrels by which Europe was torn in 
pieces. And this great thought must have been ger- 
minating in the popular heart ever since the speech was 
spoken • for we shall see at the end of the period we arc 
describing how instantaneously the cry for a crusade 
was responded to in all lands. In the mean time, the 
first joy of their deliverance from the expected destruc- 
tion impelled all classes of society in a more honourable 
and useful path than they had ever hitherto trod. As 
if by universal consent, the first attention was paid to 
the maintenance of the churches, those holy buildings 
by whose virtues the wrath of Heaven had been turned 
away. In France, and Italy, and Germany, the fabrics 
had in many places been allowed to fall into ruin. They 
were now renovated and ornamented with the costliest 
materials, and with an architectural skill which, if it 
previously existed, had had no room for its display. 
Stately cathedrals took the place of the humble buildings 
in which the services had been conducted before. Every 
thing was projected on a gigantic scale, with the idea 
of permanence prominently brought forward, now that 
the threatened end of all things was seen to be post- 



BUILDINGS. 243 

poned. The foundations were broad and deep, the walls 
of* immense thickness, rooTs steep and high to keep off 
the rain and snow, and square buttressed towers to sus- 
tain the church and furnish it at the same time with 
military defence. It was a holy occupation, and the 
clergy took a prominent part in the new movement. 
Bishops and monks were the principal members of a 
confraternity who devoted themselves to the science of 
architecture and founded all their works on the exact 
rules of symmetry and fitness. Artists from Italy, 
where Eoman models were everywhere seen, and enthu- 
siastic students from the south of France, where the 
great works of the Empire must have exercised an en- 
nobling influence on their taste and fancy, brought their 
tribute of memory or invention to the design. Tall 
pillars supported the elevated vault, instead of the flat 
roof of former days; and gradually an approach was 
made to what, in after-periods, was recognised as the 
pure Gothic. Here, then, was at last a real science, the 
offspring of the highest aspirations of the human mind. 
Churches rising in rich profusion in all parts of the 
country were the centres of architectural taste. The 
castle of the noble was no longer to be a mere mass of 
stones huddled on each other, to protect its inmates 
from outward attack. The skill of the learned builder 
was called in, and on picturesque heights, safe from hos- 
tile assault by the difficulty of approach, rose turret and 
bartizan, arched gateway and square-flanked towers, to 
add new features to the landscape, and help the march 
of civilization, by showing to that allegorizing age the 
result, both for strength and beauty, of regularity and 
proportion. For at this time allegory, which gave an 
inner meaning to outward things, was in full force. 
There was no portion of the parish church which had 
not its mystical significance; and no doubt, at the end 



244 ELEVENTH CENTURY. 

of this century, the architectural meaning of the exter- 
nal alteration of the structure was perceived, when the 
great square tower, which typified resistance to worldly 
aggression, was exchanged for the tall and graceful spire 
which pointed encouragingly to heaven. Occasions were 
eagerly sought for to give employment to the ruling 
passion. Building went on in all quarters. The begin- 
ning of this century found eleven hundred and eight 
monasteries in France alone. In the course of a few 
years she was put in possession of three hundred and 
twenty-six more. The magnificent Abbey of 
Fontenelle was restored in 1035 by William of 
jSTormandy; and this same William, whom we shall 
afterwards see in the somewhat different character of 
Conqueror and devastator of England, was the founder 
and patron of more abbeys and monasteries than any 
other man. Many of them are still erect, to attest the 
solidity of his work ; the ruins of the others raise our 
surprise that they are not yet entire — so vast in their 
extent and gigantic in their materials. But the same 
character of permanence extended to all the works of 
this great builder's* hands — the systems of government 
no less than the fabrics of churches. The remains of his 
feudalism in our country, no less than the fragments of 
his masonry at Bayeux, Fecamp, and St. Michael's, 
attest the cyclopean scale on which his superstructures 
were reared. Nor were these great architectural efforts 
which characterize this period made only on behalf of 
the clergy. It gives a very narrow notion, as Michelet 
has observed, of the uses and purposes of those enor- 
mous buildings, to view them merely as places for public 
worship and the other offices of religion. The church 
in a district was, in those days, what a hundred other 

* He was called Le Grand Batisseur. 



CHURCHES. 245 

buildings are required to make up in the present. It 
was the town-hall, the market-place, the concert-room, 
the theatre, the school, the news-room, and the vestry, 
all in one. We are to remember that poverty was 
almost universal. The cottages in which the serfs and 
even the freemen resided were wretched hovels. They 
had no windows, they were damp and airless, and were 
merely considered the human kennels into which the 
peasantry retired to sleep. In contrast to this miserable 
den there arose a building vast and beautiful, conse- 
crated by religion, ornamented with carving and colour, 
large enough to enable the whole population to wander 
in its aisles, with darker recesses under the shade of 
pillars, to give opportunity for familiar conversation or 
the enjoyment of the family meal. The church was the 
poor man's palace, where he felt that all the building 
belonged to him and was erected for his use. It was 
also his castle, where no enemy could reach him, and 
the love and pride which filled his heart in contemplat- 
ing the massive proportions and splendid elevation of 
the glorious fane overflowed towards the officers of the 
church. The priest became glorified in his eyes as the 
officiating servant in that greatest of earthly buildings, 
and the bishop far outshone the dignity of kings when 
it was known that he had plenary authority over many 
such majestic fabrics. Ascending from the known to 
the unknown, the Pope of Borne, the Bishop of Bishops, 
shone upon the bewildered mind of the peasant with a 
light reflected from the object round which all his vene- 
ration had gathered from his earliest days — the scene 
of all the incidents of his life — the hallowed sanctuary 
into which he had been admitted as an infant, and 
whose vaults should echo to the funeral service when he 
should have died. 

But this century was distinguished for an upheaving 

21* 



246 ELEVENTH CENTURY. 

of the human mind, which found its development in 
other things besides the bursting forth of architectural 
skill. It seemed that the chance of continued endur- 
ance, vouchsafed to mankind by the rising of the sun on 
the first morning of the eleventh century, gave an im- 
pulse to long-pent-up thoughts in all the directions of 
inquiry. The dulness of unquestioning undiscrimi- 
nating belief was disturbed by the freshening breezes of 
dissidence and discussion. The Pope himself, the vene- 
rable Sylvester the Second, had acquired all the wisdom 
of the Arabians by attending the Mohammedan schools 
in the royal city of Cordova. There he had learned the 
mysteries of the secret sciences, and the more useful 
knowledge — which he imported into the Christian world 
— of the Arabic numerals. The Saracenic barbarism 
had long yielded to the blandishments of the climate 
and soil of Spain • and emirs and sultans, in their 
splendid gardens on the Guadalquivir, had been dis- 
cussing the most abstruse or subtle points of philosophy 
while the professed teachers of Christendom were sunk 
in the depths of ignorance and credulity. Sylvester had 
made such progress in the unlawful learning accessible 
at the head-quarters of the unbelievers, that his simple 
contemporaries could only account for it by supposing 
he had sold himself to the enemy of mankind in ex- 
change for such prodigious information. He was ac- 
cused of the unholy arts of magic and necromancy; and 
all that orthodoxy could do to assert her superiority 
over such acquirements was to spread the report, which 
was very generally credited, that when the years of the 
compact were expired, the paltering fiend appeared in 
person and carried off his debtor from the midst of the 
affrighted congregation, after a severe logical discussion, 
in which the father of lies had the best of the argument. 
This was a conclusive proof of the danger of all logical 



SCHOLARSHIP. 247 

acquirements. But as time passed on, and the darkness 
of the tenth century was more and more left behind, 
there arose a race of men who were not terrified by 
the fate of the philosophic Sylvester from cultivating 
their understandings to the highest pitch. Among 
those there were two who particularly left their marks 
on the genius of the time, and who had the strange for- 
tune also of succeeding each other as Archbishops of 
Canterbury. These were Lanfranc and Anselm. When 
Lanfranc was still a monk at Caen, he had attracted 
,„ „ to his prelections more than four thousand 

a.d. 1042. L 

scholars ; and Anselm, while in the same humble 
rank, raised the schools of Bee in Normandy to a great 
reputation. From these two men, both Italians by 
birth, the Scholastic Philosophy took its rise. The old 
unreasoning assent to the doctrines of Christianity had 
now new life breathed into it by the permitted applica- 
tion of intellect and reason to the support of truth. In 
the darkness and misery of the previous century, the 
deep and mysterious dogma of Transubstantiation had 
made its first authoritative appearance in the Church. 
Acquiesced in by the docile multitude, and accepted by 
the enthusiastic and imaginative as an inexpressible gift 
of fresh grace to mankind, and a fitting crown and con- 
summation of the daily-recurring miracles with which 
the Mother and Witness of the truth proved and main- 
tained her mission, it had been attacked by Berenger of 
Tours, who used all the resources of reason and ingenuity 
to demonstrate its unsoundness. But Lanfranc came to 
the rescue, and by the exercise of a more vigorous dia- 
lectic, and the support of the great majority of the 
clergy, confuted all that Berenger advanced, had him 
stripped of his archdeaconry of Angers and other pre- 
ferments, and left him in such destitution and disfavour 
that the discomfited opponent of the Eeal Presence was 



248 



ELEVENTH CENTURY. 



, A _- forced to read his retractation at Eome, and 
only expiated the enormity of his fault by the 
rigorous seclusion of the remainder of his life. The 
hopeful feature in this discussion was, that though the 
influence of ecclesiastic power was not left dormant, in 
the shape of temporal ruin and spiritual threats, the 
exercise of those usual weapons of authority was ac- 
companied with attempts at argument and conviction. 
Lanfranc, indeed, in the very writings in which he used 
his talents to confute the heretic, made such use of his 
reasoning and inductive faculties that he nearly fell 
under the ban of heresy himself. He had the boldness 
to imagine a man left to the exercise of his natural 
powers alone, and bringing observation, argument, and 
ratiocination to the discovery of the Christian dogmas ; 
but he was glad to purchase his complete rehabilitation, 
as champion of the Church, by a work in which he 
admits reason to the subordinate position of a supporter 
or commentator, but by no means a foundation or in- 
separable constituent of an article of the faith. Any 
thing was better than the blindness and ignorance of 
the previous age; and questions of the purest meta- 
physics were debated with a fire and animosity which 
could scarcely have been excited by the greatest worldly 
interests. The Nominalists and Ecalists began their 
wordy and unprofitable war, which after occasional 
truces may at any moment break out, as it has often 
done before, though it would now be confined to the 
professorial chairs in. our universities, and not exercise 
a preponderating influence on the course of human 
affairs. The dispute (as the names of the disputants 
import) arose upon the question as to whether universal 
ideas were things or only the names of things, and on 
this the internecine contest went on. All the subtlety 
of the old Greek philosophies was introduced into the 



GREGORY THE SEVENTH. 249 

scholasticisms and word-splittings of those useless 
arguers ; and vast reputations, which have not yet de- 
cayed, were built on this very unsubstantial foundation. 
It shows how immeasurably the efforts of the intellect, 
even when misapplied, transcend the greatest triumphs 
of military skill, when we perceive that in this age, 
which was illustrated by the Conquest of England, first 
by the Danes, and then by William, by the marvellous 
rise and triumphant progress of the sons of Tancred of 
Hauteville, and by the startling incidents of the First 
Crusade, — the central figure is a meagre, hard-featured 
monk, who rises from rank to rank, till he governs and 
tramples on the world under the name of Gregory the 
Seventh. It may seem to some people, who look at the 
present condition of the Eomish Church, that too pro- 
minent a place is assigned in these early centuries to 
the growth and aggrandizement of the ecclesiastical 
power; but as the object of these pages is to point out 
what seems the main distinguishing feature of each of 
the periods selected for separate notice, it would be un- 
pardonable to pass over the Papacy, varying in extent 
of power and pretension at every period when it comes 
into view, and always impressing a distinct and indivi- 
dualizing character on the affairs with which it is con- 
cerned. It is the most stable, and at the same time the 
most flexible, of powers. Kingdoms and dynasties 
flourish and decay, and make no permanent mark on 
the succeeding age. The authority of a ruler like 
Charlemagne or Otho rises in a full tide, and, having 
reached its limits, yields to the irresistible ebb. But 
Roman influence knows no retrocession. Even when its 
pretensions are defeated and its assaults repulsed, it 
claims as de jure what it has lost de facto, and, though it 
were reduced to the possession of a single church, 
would continue to issue its orders to the habitable globe. 



250 ELEVENTH CENTURY. 

Like the last descendant of the Great Mogul, who 
professed to rule over Hindostan while his power was 
limited to the walls of his palace at Delhi, the bearer of 
the Tiara abates no jot of his state and dignity when 
every vestige of his influence has disappeared. While 
ridiculed as a puppet or pitied as a sufferer at home, he 
arrogates more than royal power in regions which have 
long thrown off his authority, and announces his will by 
the voice of blustering and brazen heralds to a deaf and 
rebellious generation, which looks on him with no more 
respect than the grotesquely-dressed conjurers before a 
tent-door at a fair. But the herald's voice would have 
been listened to with respect and obedience if it had 
been heard at the Pope's gate in 1073. There had never 
been such a pope before, and never has been such a 
pope since. Others have been arrogant and ambitious, 
but no one has ever equalled Hildebrand in arrogance 
and ambition. Strength of will, also, has been the 
ruling character of many of the pontiffs, but no one has 
ever equalled Hildebrand in the undying tenacity with 
which he pursued his object. He was like Eoland, the 
hero of Eoncesvalles, who even in defeat knew how to 
keep his enemies at a distance by blowing upon his 
horn. "When Durandal foiled the vanquished Gregory, 
he spent his last breath in defiant blasts upon his Olifant. 

But there were many circumstances which not only 
rendered the rise of such a person possible, but made 
his progress easy and almost unavoidable. First of all, 
the crusading spirit which commenced with this century 
had introduced a great change in the principles and 
practice of the higher clergy. It is a mistake to suppose 
that the expedition to Jerusalem, under the preaching 
of Peter the Hermit, which took place in 1094, was the 
earliest manifestation of the aggressive spirit of the 
Christian, as such, against the unbeliever. A holy war 



WARLIKE BISHOPS. 251 

was proclaimed against the Saracens of Italy at an early 
date. An armed assault upon the Jews, as descendants 
of the murderers of Christ, had taken place in 1080. 
Even the Norman descent on England was considered 
by the more devout of the Papist followers in the light 
of a crusade against the enemies of the Cross, as the 
Anglo-Saxons were not sufficiently submissive to the 
commands of Eome. Bishops, we saw, were held in a 
former century to derogate from the sanctity of their 
characters when they fought in person like the other 
occupants of fiefs. But the sacred character which ex- 
peditions like those against Sicily andi Salerno gave to 
the struggle made a great difference in the popular esti- 
mate of a prelate's sphere of action. He was now held 
to be strictly in the exercise of his duty when he was 
slaying an infidel with the edge of the sword. He was 
not considered to be more in his place at the head of a 
procession in honour of a saint than at the head of an 
army of cavaliers destroying the enemies of the faith. 
Warlike skill and personal courage became indispensable 
in a bishop of the Church ; and in Germany these quali- 
ties were so highly prized, that the inhabitants of a dio- 
cese in the empire, presided over by a man of peace and 
holiness, succeeded in getting him deposed by the Pope 
on the express ground of his being " placable and far 
from valiant." The epitaph of a popular bishop was, 
that he was " good priest and brave chevalier." The 
manners and feelings of the camp soon became disse- 
minated among the reverend divines, who inculcated 
Christianity with a battle-axe in their hands. They 
quarrelled with neighbouring barons for portions of 
land. They seized the incomes of churches and abbeys. 
Bishop and baron strove with each other who could get 
most for himself out of the property of the Church. The 
layman forced his serfs to elect his infant son to an 



ELEVENTH CENTURY. 



abbacy or bishopric, and then pillaged the estate and 
stripped the lower clergy in the minor's name. Other 
abuses followed; and though the strictness of the rule 
against the open marriage of priests had long ceased, and 
m some places the superiority of wedded incumbents had 
been so recognised that the appointment of a pastor 
was objected to unless he was accompanied by a wife- 
still, the letter of the Church-law, enjoining celibacy on 
all orders of the clergy, had never been so generally 
neglected as at the present time. No attempt was 
made to conceal the almost universal infraction of the 
.rule. Bishops themselves brought forward their wives 
on occasions of state and ceremony, who disputed the 
place of honour with the wives of counts and barons 
When strictly inquired into, however, these alliances 
were not allowed to have the effect of regular matri- 
mony. They were looked upon merely as a sort of 
licensed and not dishonourable concubinage, and the 
children resulting from them were deprived of the rights 
of legitimacy. Yet the wealth and influence of their 
parents made their exclusion from the succession to 
land of little consequence. They were enriched suffi- 
ciently with the spoil of the diocese to be independent of 
the rights of heirship. This must have led, however, to 
many cases of hardship, when the feudal baron, tempted 
by the riches of the neighbouring see, had laid violent 
hands on the property, and by bribery or force procured 
Ins own nomination as bishop. The children of any 
marriage contracted after that time lost their inherit- 
ance of the barony by the episcopal incapacity of their 
father, and must have added to the general feeling of 
discontent caused by the junction of the two characters. 
For when the tyrannical lord became a prelate, it only 
added the weapons of ecclesiastic domination to the 
baronial armory of cruelty and extortion. He could 



NORMANS. 253 

now withhold all the blessings of the Church, as bishop, 
unless the last farthing were yielded up to his demands 
as landlord. An appalling state of things, when the re- 
fractory vassal", who had escaped the sword, could bo 
knocked into submission by the crozier, both wielded by 
the same man. The Church, therefore, in its highest 
offices, had become as mundane and ambitious as the 
nobility. And it must have been evident to a far dimmer 
sight than Hildebrand's, that, as the power and inde- 
pendence of the barons had been gained at the expense 
of the Crown, the wealth and possessions of the bishops 
would weaken their allegiance to the Pope. Sprung 
from the lowest ranks of the people, the grim-hearted 
monk never for a moment was false to his order. Ho 
looked on lords and kings as tyrants and oppressors, on 
bishops themselves as lording it over God's heritage and 
requiring to be held down beneath the foot of some 
levelling and irresistible power, which would show them 
the nothingness of rank and station ; and for this end 
he dreamed of a popedom, universal in its claims, domi- 
neering equally over all conditions of men — an incarna- 
tion of the fiercest democracy, trampling on the people, 
and of the bitterest republicanism, aiming at more than 
monarchical power. He had the wrath of generations 
of serfdom rankling in his heart, and took a satisfaction, 
sweetened by revenge, in bringing low the haughty 
looks of the proud. And in these strainings after the 
elevation of the Papacy he was assisted by several 
powers on which he could securely rely. 

The Normans, who by a wonderful fortune had made 
themselves masters of England under the guidance of 
William, were grateful to the Pope for the assistance he 
had given them by prohibiting all opposition to their 
conquest on the part of the English Church. Another 
branch of Normans were still more useful in their sup- 

22 



254 ELEVENTH CENTURY. 

port of the papal chair. A body of pilgrims to Jeru- 
salem, amounting to only forty men, had started from 
Scandinavia in 1006, and, having landed at Salerno, 
were turned aside from completing their journey by the 
equally meritorious occupation of resisting the Saracens 
who were besieging the town. They defeated them 
with great slaughter, and were amply rewarded for 
their prowess with goods and gear. News of their 
gallantry and of their reward reached their friends and 
relations at home. In a few years they were followed 
by swarms of their countrymen, who disposed of their 
acquisitions in Upper Italy to the highest bidder, and 
were remunerated by grants of land in Naples for 
their exertion on behalf of Sergius the king. But in 
1037 a fresh body of adventurers proceeded from the 
neighbourhood of Coutances in Normandy, under the 
command of three brothers of the family of Hauteville, 
to the assistance of the same monarch, and, with the 
usual prudence of the Norman race, when they had 
chased the enemy from the endangered territory, made 
no scruple of keeping it for themselves. Bobert, called 
Guiscard, or the Wise, was the third brother, and suc- 
ceeded to the newly-acquired sovereignty in 1057. In 
a short time he alarmed the Pope with the prospect of 
so unscrupulous and so powerful a neighbour. His 
Holiness, therefore, demanded the assistance of the 
German Emperor, and boldly took the field. The Nor- 
mans were no whit daunted with the opposition of the 
Father of Christendom, and dashed through all obstacles 
till they succeeded in taking him prisoner. Instead of 
treating him with harshness, and exacting exorbitant 
ransom, as would have been the action of a less saga- 
cious politician, the Norman threw himself on his knees 
before the captive pontiff, bewailed his hard case in 
being forced to appear so contumacious to his spiritual 



COUNTESS MATILDA. 255 

ord and master, and humbly besought him to pardon 

lis transgression, and accept the suzerainty of all the 

_ n lands he possessed and of all he should here- 
l.d. 1059. -* , 

after subdue. It was a delightful surprise to 

the Pope, who immediately ratified all the procced- 
ngs of his repentant son, and in a short time was re- 
warded by seeing Apulia and the great island of Sicily 
leld in homage as fiefs of St. Peter's chair. From 
thenceforth the Italian Normans were the bulwarks of 
the papal throne. But, more powerful than the Nor- 
mans of England, and more devoted personally to the 
popes than the greedy adventurers of Apulia, the 
Countess Matilda was the greatest support of all the 
pretensions of the Holy Sec. Young and beautiful, the 
holder of the greatest territories in Italy, this lady was 
the most zealous of all the followers of the Pope. 
Though twice married, she on both occasions separated 
from her husband to throw herself with more undivided 
energy into the interests of the Church. "With men 
and money, and all the influence that her position as a 
princess and her charms as a woman could give, the 
sovereign pontiff had no enemy to fear as long as ho 
retained the friendship of his enthusiastic daughter. 
Hildebrand was the ruling spirit of the papal court, 
[„_ and was laying his plans for future action, 

A.D. 1060. «/ & J •> 

while the world was still scarcely aware of his 
existence. He began, while only Archdeacon of Borne, 
by a forcible reformation of some of the irregularities 
which had crept into the practice of the clergy, as a 
preparatory step to making the clergy dominant over 
all the other orders in the State. He gave orders, in 
the name of Stephen the Tenth, for every married priest 
to be displaced and to be separated from his wife. For 
this end he stirred up the ignorant fanaticism of the 
people, and encouraged them in outrages upon the 



256 



ELEVENTH CENTURY. 



offending clergy, which frequently ended in death. The 
virtues of the cloister had still a great hold on the popu- 
lar veneration, in spite of the notorious vices of the 
monastic establishments, both male and female; and 
Hildebrand's invectives on the wickedness of marriage, 
and his praises of the sanctity of a single life, were 
listened to with equal admiration. The secular clergy 
were forced to adopt the unsocial and demoralizing 
principles of their monkish rivals ; and when all family 
affections were made sinful, and the feelings of the 
pastor concentrated on the interests of his profession, 
the popes had secured, in the whole body of the Church, 
the unlimited obedience and blind support which had 
hitherto been the characteristic of the monastic orders. 
With the assistance of the warlike Normans, the wealth 
and influence of the Countess Matilda, the adhesion of 
the Church to his schemes of aggrandizement, he felt it 
time to assume in public the power he had exercised so 
long in the subordinate position of counsellor of the 
popes; and the monk seated himself on what he con- 
sidered the highest of earthly thrones, and immediately 
the contest between the temporal and spiritual 
powers began. The King of France (Philip the 
First) and the Emperor of Germany (Henry the Fourth) 
were both of disreputable life, and offered an easy mark 
for the assaults of the fiery pontiff. He threatened 
and reprimanded them for simony and disobedience, 
proclaimed his authority over kings and princes as a 
fact which no man could dispute without impiety, and 
had the inward pleasure of seeing the proudest of the 
nobles, and finally the most powerful of the sove- 
reigns, of Europe, forced to obey his mandates. The 
pent-up hatred of his race and profession was gratified 
by the abasement of birth and power. 

The struggle with the Empire was on the subject of 



STRUGGLE BETWEEN POPE AND EMPEROR. 257 

investiture. The successors of Charlemagne had always 
retained a voice in the appointment of the bishops and 
Church dignitaries in their states; they had even fre- 
quently nominated to the See of Eome, as to the other 
bishoprics in their dominions. The present wearer of 
the iron crown had displaced three contending popes, 
who were disturbing the peace of the city by their 
ferocious quarrels, and had appointed others in their 
room. There was no murmur of opposition to their 
appointment. They were pious and venerable men ; 
and of each of them the inscrutable Hildebrand had 
managed to make himself the confidential adviser, and 
in reality the guide and master. Even in his own case 
he waited patiently till he had secured the emperor's 
legal ratification of his election, and then, armed with 
legitimacy, and burning with smothered indignation, he 
kicked down the ladder by which he had risen, and 
wrote an insulting letter to the emperor, commanding 
him to abstain from simony, and to renounce the right 
of investiture by the ring and cross. These, he main- 
tained, were the signs of spiritual dignity, and their 
oestowal was inherent in the Pope. The time for the 
message was admirably chosen ; for Henry was engaged 
in a hard struggle for life and crown with the Saxons 
and Thuringians, who were in open revolt. Henry 
promised obedience to the pontiff's wish, but when his 
enemies were defeated he withdrew his concession. 
The Pope thundered a sentence of excommunication 
against him, released his subjects from their oath of 
fealty, -and pronounced him deprived of the throne. 
The emperor was not to be left behind in the race of 

nn _„ obiuro-ation. He summoned his nobles and pre- 
a.d. 1076. J» i 

lates to a council at Worms, and pronounced 
sentence of deprivation on the Pope. Then arose such 
a storm against the unfortunate Henry as only religious 
R 22* 



258 ELEVENTH CENTURY. 

differences can create. His subjects had been oppressed, 
his nobility insulted, his clergy impoverished, and all 
classes of his people were glad of the opportunity of 
hiding their hatred of his oppressions under the cloak 
of regard for the interests of religion. He was forced 
to yield; and, crossing the Alps in the middle of winter, 
he presented himself at the castle of Canossa. Here 
the Pope displayed the humbleness and generosity of 
his Christian character, by leaving the wretched man 
three days and nights in the outer court, shivering with 
cold and barefoot, while His Holiness and the Countess 
Matilda were comfortably closeted within. And after 
this unheard-of degradation, all that could be wrung 
from the hatred of the inexorable monk was a promise 
that the suppliant should be tried with justice,. and that, 
if he succeeded in proving his innocence, he should be 
reinstated on his throne; but if he were found guilty, 
he should be punished with the utmost rigour of eccle- 
siastical law. 

Common sense and good feeling were revolted by this 
unexampled insolence. Friends gathered round Henry 
when the terms of his sentence were heard. The 
Eomans themselves, who had hitherto been blindly sub- 
missive, were indignant at the presumption of their 
bishop. None continued faithful except the imper- 
turbable Countess Matilda. He was still to her the 
representative of divine goodness and superhuman 
power. But her troops were beaten and her money 
was exhausted in the holy quarrel. Eobert Guiscard, 
indeed, came to the rescue, and rewarded himself for 
delivering the Pope by sacking the city of Eome. Half 
the houses were burned, and half the population killed 
or sold as slaves. It was from amidst the desolation 
his ambition had caused that the still-unsubdued Hildc- 
brand was guarded by the Normans to the citadel of 



DEATH OF HILDEBRAND. 259 

Salerno, and there he died, issuing his orders and curses 

to his latest hour, and boasting with his last breath that 

" he had loved righteousness and hated iniquity, and 

i„o, that therefore he expired in exile." After this 

A.D. 108O. . X 

man's throwing off the mask of moderation 
under which his predecessors had veiled their claims, 
the world was no longer left in doubt of the aims and 
objects of the spiritual power. There seems almost a 
taint of insanity in the extravagance of his demands. 
In the published collection of his maxims we see the full 
extent of the theological tyranny he had in view. 
"There is but one name in the world," we read; "and 
that is the Pope's. He only can use the ornaments of 
empire. All princes ought to kiss his feet. He alone 
can nominate or displace bishops and assemble or dis- 
solve councils. Nobody can judge him. His mere 
election constitutes him a saint. He has never erred, 
and never shall err in time to come. He can depose 
princes and release subjects from their oaths of fidelity." 
Yet, in spite of the wildness of this language, the igno- 
rance of the period was so great, and the relations of 
European nations so hostile, that the most daring of 
these assumptions found supporters either in the super- 
stitious veneration of the peoples or the enmity and 
interests of the princes. The propounder of those 
amazing propositions was apparently defeated, and died 
disgraced and hated; but his successors were careful 
not to withdraw the most untenable of his claims, even 
while they did not bring them into exercise. They 
lay in an armory, carefully stored and guarded, to be 
brought out according to the exigencies either of the 
papal chair itself, or of the king or emperor who for the 
moment was in possession of the person of the Pope. 
None of the great potentates of Europe, therefore, was 
anxious to diminish a power which might be employed 



2 G0 ELEVENTH CENTURY. 

for his own advantage, and all of them by turns en- 
couraged the aggressions of the Papacy, with a short- 
sighted wisdom, to be an instrument of offence against 
their enemies. Little encouragement, indeed, was of- 
fered at this time to opposition to the spiritual despot. 
Though Hildebrand had died a refugee, it was remarked 
with pious awe that Henry the Fourth, his rival and 
opponent, was punished in a manner which showed the 
highest displeasure of Heaven. His children, at the 
instigation of the Pope, rebelled against him. He was 
conquered in battle and taken prisoner by his youngest 
son. He was stripped of all his possessions, and at last 
so destitute and forsaken that he begged for a sub- 
chanter's place in a village church for the sake of its 
wretched salary, and died in such extremity of 
want and desolation that hunger shortened his 
days. For five years his body was left without the 
decencies of interment in a cellar in the town of Spires. 
But an immense movement was now to take place in 
the European mind, which had the greatest influence 
on the authority of Eorae. A crusade against the 
,„' enemies of the faith was proclaimed in the Year 

a.d. 1095. x J 

1095, and from all parts of Europe a great cry 
of approval was uttered in all tongues, for it hit the 
right chord in the ferocious and superstitious heart of 
the world j and it was felt that the great battle of the 
Cross and the Crescent was most fitly to be decided for- 
ever on the soil of the Holy Land. 

From the very beginning of this century the thought 
of armed intervention in the affairs of Palestine had 
boon present in the general mind. Eeligious difference 
had long been ready to take the form of open war. 
As the Church strengthened and settled into more dog- 
matic unity, the desire to convert by force and retain 
within the fold by penalty and proscription had in- 
creased. As yet some reluctance was felt to put a pro- 



PETER THE HERMIT. 261 

fessing Christian to death on merely a difference of 
doctrine, but with the open gainsayers of the faith no 
parley could be held. Thousands, in addition to their 
religious animosities, had personal injuries to avenge; 
for pilgrimage to Jerusalem was already in full favour, 
and the weary wayfarers had to complain of the hos- 
tility of the turbaned possessors of the Holy Sepulchre, 
and the indignities and peril to which they were ex- 
posed the moment they came within the infidel's do- 
main. Why should the unbelievers be allowed any 
longer to retain the custody of such inherently Chris- 
tian territories as the Mount of Olives and the Garden 
of Gethsemane ? Why should the unbaptized followers 
of Mohammed, those children of perdition, pollute with 
hostile feet the sacred ground which had been the wit- 
ness of so many miracles and still furnished so many 
relics which manifested superhuman power? Besides, 
what was the wealth of other cities — their gold and 
precious jewels — to the store of incalculable riches con- 
tained in the very stones and woodwork of the metro- 
polis and cradle of the faith ? Bones of martyrs — 
garments of saints — nails of the cross — thorns of the 
crown — were all lying ready to be gathered up by the 
faithful priesthood who would lead the expedition. 
And who could be held responsible, in this world or the 
next, for any sins, however grievous, who had washed 
them out by purifying the floors of Zion with the blood 
of slaughtered Saracens and saying prayers and kneel- 
ing in contemplation within sight of the Sepulchre itself? 
So Peter the Hermit, an enthusiast who preached a holy 
war, was listened to as if he spake with the tongues of 
angels. The ravings of his lunacy had a prodigious 
effect on all classes and in all lands; and suddenly there 
was gathered together a confused rabble of pilgrims, 
armed in every variety of fashion — princes and beg- 
gars, robbers and adventurers — the scum of great cities 



262 ELEVENTH CENTURY. 

and the simple-hearted peasantry from distant farms — 
upwards of three hundred thousand in number, all 
pouring down towards the seaports and anxious to 
cross over to the land where so many high hopes were 
placed. Yast numbers of this multitude found their 
way from France through Italy; and luckily for Urban 
the Second — the fifth in succession from Gregory — 
they took the opportunity of paying a visit to the city 
of Rome, scarcely less venerable in their eyes than Jeru- 
salem itself They were the soldiers of the Cross, and 
in that character felt bound to pay a more immediate 
submission to the Chief of Christianity than to their 
native kings. They found the city divided between 
two rivals for the tiara, and, having decided in favour 
of Urban, chased away the anti-pope who was ap- 
pointed by the Imperial choice. Terrified at the acces- 
sion of such powerful supporters, the Germans were 
withdrawn from Italy, and Urban felt that the claims 
of Hildebrand were not incapable of realization if he 
could get quit of unruly barons and obstinate monarchs 
by engaging them in a distant and ruinous expedition. 
It needed little to spread the flame of fanaticism over 
the whole of Christendom. The accounts given of this 
first Crusade transcend the wildest imaginings of ro- 
mance. An indiscriminate multitude of all nations and 
tongues seemed impelled by some irresistible impulse 
towards the East. Ostensibly engaged in a religious 
service, enriched with promises and absolutions from 
the Pope, giving up all their earthly possessions, and 
filled with the one idea of liberating the Holy Land, it 
might have been expected that the sobriety and order 
of their march would have been characteristic of such 
elevating aspirations. But the infamy of their behaviour, 
their debauchery, irregularity, and dishonesty, have 
never been equalled by the basest and most degraded of 
mankind. Like a flood they poured through the lands 



SECOND CRUSADE. 263 

of Italy, Bohemia, and Germany, polluting the cities 
with their riotous lives, and poisoning the air with the 
festering corruption of their innumerable dead. They 
at last found shipping from the ports, and presented 
themselves, drunk with fanatical pride, and maddened 
with the sufferings they had undergone, before the 
astonished people of Constantinople. That enervated 
and over-civilized population looked with disgust on the 
unruly mass. Of the vast multitudes who had started 
under the guidance of Peter the Hermit, not more than 
20,000 survived; and of these none found their way to 
the object of their search. The Turks, who had by 
this time obtained the mastery of Asia, cut them in 
pieces when they had left the shelter of Constantinople, 
and Alexis Comnenus, the Grecian emperor, had little 
hope of aid against the Mohammedan invaders from the 
unruly levies of Europe. 

But in the following year a new detachment made 
their appearance in his states. This was the second 
ban, or crusade of the knights and barons. Better re- 
gulated in its military organization than the other, it 
presented the same astonishing scenes of debauchery 
and vice; and dividing, for the sake of sustenance, into 
four armies, and taking four different routes, they at 
length, in greatly-diminished numbers, but with un- 
abated hope and energy, presented themselves before 
the walls of Constantinople. This was no mob like 
their famished and fainting predecessors. All the gallant 
lords of Europe were here, inspired by knightly courage 
and national rivalries to distinguish themselves in fight 
and council. Of these the best-known were Godfrey of 
Bouillon, Baldwyn of Flanders, Robert of Normandy, 
(William the Conqueror's eldest son,) Hugh the Great, 
Count of Yermandois, and Eaymond of St. Gilles. Six 
hundred thousand men had left their homes, with innu- 
merable attendants — women, and jugglers, and servants, 



264 ELEVENTH CENTURY. 

and workmen of all kinds. Tens of thousands perished 
by the way; others established themselves in the cities 
on their route to keep up the communication ; and at 
last the Genoese and Pisan vessels conveyed to the 
Golden Horn the strength of all Europe, the hardy sur- 
vivors of all the perils of that unexampled march — few 
indeed in number, but burning with zeal and bravery. 
Alexis lost no time in diverting their dangerous strength 
from his own realms. He let them loose upon Nicea, 
and when it yielded to their valour he had the clever- 
ness to outwit the Christian warriors, and claimed the 
city as his possession. On pursuing their course, they 
found themselves, after a victory over the Turks at 
Dorylseum, in the great Plain of Phrygia. Hunger, 
thirst, the extremity of heat, and the difficulty of the 
march, brought confusion and dismay into their ranks. 
All the horses died. Knights and chevaliers were seen 
mounted on asses, and even upon oxen ; and the baggage 
was packed upon goats, and not unfrequently on swine 
and dogs. Thirst was fatal to five hundred in a single 
day. Quarrels between the nationalities added to these 
calamities. Lorrains and Italians, the men of Normandy 
and of Provence, were at open feud. And yet, in spite 
of these drawbacks, the great procession advanced. 
Baldwyn and Tancred succeeded in getting possession 
of the town of Edessa, on the Euphrates, and opened a 
^ nnn communication with the Christians of Armenia. 

a.d. 1098. 

The siege of Antioch was their next operation, 
and the luxuries of the soil and climate were more fatal 
to the Crusaders than want and pain had been. On the 
rich banks of the Orontes, and in the groves of Daphne, 
they lost the remains of discipline and self-command 
and gave themselves up to the wildest excesses. But 
with the winter their enjoyment came to an end. Their 
camp was flooded; they suffered the extremities of 
famine; and when there were no more horses and im- 



ANTIOCII TAKEN. 205 

pure animals to eat, they satiated their hunger on the 
bodies of their slaughtered enemies. Help, however, 
was at hand, or they must have perished to the last 
man. Bohemund corrupted the fidelity of a renegade 
officer in Antioch, and, availing themselves of a dark 
and stormy night, they scaled the walls with ladders, 
and rushed into the devoted city, shouting the Crusaders' 
war-cry : — " It is the will of God !" and Antioch became 
a Christian princedom. But not without difficulty was 
this new possession retained. The Turks, under the 
orders of Kerboga, surrounded it with two hundred 
thousand men. There was neither entrance nor exit 
possible, and the worst of their previous sufferings 
began to be renewed. But Heaven came to the rescue. 
A monk of the name of Peter Bartholomew dreamt 
that under the great altar of the church would be found 
the spear which pierced the Saviour on the cross. The 
precious weapon rewarded their toil in digging, and 
armed with this the Christian charge was irresistible, 
and the Turks were cut in pieces or dispersed. Instead 
of making straight for Jerusalem, they lingered six 
months longer in Antioch, suffering from plague and the 
fatigues they had undergone. When at last the forward 
order was given, a remnant, consisting of fifty thousand 
men out of all the original force, began the march. As 
they got nearer the object of their search, and recog- 
nised the places commemorated in Holy Writ, their en- 
thusiasm knew no bounds. The last elevation was at 
length surmounted, and Jerusalem lay in full view. u O 
blessed Jesus," cries a monk who was present, "when 
thy Holy City was seen, what tears fell from our eyes !" 
Loud shouts were raised of "Jerusalem! Jerusalem! 
God wills it! God wills it!" They stretched out their 
hands, fell upon their knees, and embraced the conse- 
crated ground. But Jerusalem was yet in the hands of 

23 



26G 



ELEVENTH CENTURY. 



the Saracens, and the sword must open their way into 
its sacred bounds. The governor had offered to admit 
the pilgrims within the walls, but in their peaceful dress 
and merely as visitors. This they refused, and deter- 
mined to wrest it from its unbelieving lords. On the 
15th of July, 1099, they found that their situation was 
no longer tenable, and that they must conquer or give 
up the siege. The brook Kedron was dried up, the sun 
poured upon them with unendurable heat, their pro- 
visions were exhausted, and in agonies of despair as 
well as of military ardour they gave the final assault. 
The struggle was long and doubtful. At length the 
Crusaders triumphed. Tancred and Godfrey were the 
first to leap into the devoted town. Their soldiers fol- 
lowed, and filled every street with slaughter. The Mos- 
que of Omar was vigorously defended, and an indiscri- 
minate massacre of Mussulmans and Jews filled the 
whole place with blood. In the mosque itself the stream 
of gore was up to the saddle-girths of a horse. The on- 
slaught was occasionally suspended for a while, to allow 
the pious conquerors to go barefoot and unarmed to 
kneel at the Holy Sepulchre j and, this act of worship 
done, they returned to their ruthless occupation, and 
continued the work of extermination for a whole week. 
The depopulated and reeking town was added to the 
domains of Christendom, and the kingdom of Jerusalem 
was offered to Godfrey of Bouillon. With a modesty 
befitting the most Christian and noble-hearted of the 
Crusaders, Godfrey contented himself with the humbler 
name of Baron of the Holy Sepulchre j and with three 
hundred knights — which were all that remained to him 
when that crowning victory had set the other survivors 
at liberty to revisit their native lands — he established a 
standing garrison in the captured city, and anxiously 
awaited reinforcements from the warlike spirits they 
hud left at home. 



TWELFTH CENTURY. 



ISmperots of (E^nnang, IBmpcrors of tfje IBast. 



Henry IV. — (cont.) 
1106. Henry V. 

House of Suabia. 
1138. Conrad III. 
1152. Frederick Barbarossa. 
1190. Henry VI. 
1198. Philip and Otho IV., (of 

Brunswick.) 



A.D. 

Alexis I. — [cont.) 
1118. John. 
1143. Manuel. 
1183. Andronicus I. 
1185. Isaac II., (the Angel.) 
1195. Alexis III. 

Itmgs of dFrattce. 

Philip I. — [cont.) 
1108. Louis VI. 
1137. Louis VII. 
1180. Philip Augustus. 



ittng of Scotland 

1165. William. 



livings of 3Englanfo. 

1100. Henry I. 
1135. Stephen. 
1154. Henry II. 
1189. Ei chard I. 
1199. John. 

1147. Second Crusade, led by Louis VII. of France. 
1189. Third Crusade, led by Frederick Barbarossa, Philip 
Augustus, and Eichard of England. 

authors* 

Bernard, (1091-1153,) Becket, (1119-1170,) Eustathius, 
Theodorus, Balsamon, Peter Lombard, William of Malmes- 
bury, (1096-1143.) 



THE TWELFTH CENTURY. 

ELEVATION OF LEARNING — POWER OF THE CHURCH 

THOMAS A-BECKETT. 

The effect of the first Crusade had been so prodigious 
that Europe was forced to pause to recover from its ex- 
haustion. More than half a million had left their homes 
in 1095; ten thousand are supposed to have returned; 
three hundred were left with Godfrey in the Christian 
city of Jerusalem; and what had become of all the 
rest ? Their bones were whitening all the roads that led 
to the Holy Land; small parties of them must have 
settled in despair or weariness in towns and villages on 
their way ; many were sold into slavery by the rapacity 
of the feudal lords whose lands they traversed; and 
when the madness of the time had originated a Crusade 
of Children, and ninety thousand boys of ten or twelve 
years of age had commenced their journey, singing 
hymns and anthems, and hoping to conquer the infidels 
with the spiritual arms of innocence and prayer, the 
whole band melted away before they reached the coast. 
Barons, and counts, and bishops, and dukes, all swooped 
down upon the devoted march, and before many weeks' 
journeying was achieved the Crusade was brought to a 
close. Most of the children had died of fatigue or star- 
vation, and the survivors had been seized as legitimate 
prey and sold as slaves. 

Meantime the brave and heroic Godfrey — the true 
hero of the expedition, for he elevated the ordinary 
virtues of knighthood and feudalism into the nobler 

23* 269 



270 



TWELFTH CENTURY. 



feelings of generosity and romance — gained the object 
of his earthly ambition. Having prayed at the sepul- 
chre; and cleansed the temple from the pollution of the 
unbelievers' presence, wearied with all his labours, and 
feeling that his task was done, he sank into deep 
despondency and died. Yolunteers in small 
numbers had occasionally gone eastward to support the 
Cross. Ambition, thoughtlessness, guilt, and fanaticism 
sent their representatives to aid the conqueror of Judea; 
and his successors found themselves strong enough to 
bid defiance to the Turkish power. They carried all 
their Western ideas along with them. They had their 
feudal holdings and knightly quarrels. The most vene- 
rated names in Holy Writ were desecrated by unseemly 
disputes or the most frivolous associations. The com- 
bination, indeed, of their native habits and their new 
acquisitions might have moved them to laughter, if the 
men of the twelfth century had been awake to the ridi- 
culous. There was a Prince of Galilee, a Marquis of 
Joppa, a Baron of Sidon, a Marquis of Tyre. Our own 
generation has renewed the strange juxtaposition of the 
East and West by the language employed in steamboats 
and railways. Trains will soon cross the Desert with 
warning whistles and loud jets of steam and all the 
phraseology of an English line. For many years the 
waters of the mysterious Eed Sea have been dashed 
into foam by paddles made in Liverpool or Glasgow. 
But these are visitors of a very different kind from Bo- 
hemund and Baldwyn. Baldwyn, indeed, seemed less in- 
clined than his companions to carry his European train- 
ing to its full extent. lie Orientalized himself in a small 
way, perhaps in imitation of Alexander the Great; and, 
dressed in the long flowing robes of the country, he 
made his attendants serve him witli prostrations, and 
almost with worship. He married a daughter of the 



MOHAMMEDAN FAITH. 271 

land, and in other respects endeavoured to ingratiate 
himself with the Saracens by treating them with kind- 
ness and consideration. The bravery of those warriors 
of the Desert endeared them to the rough-handed barons 
of the West. It was impossible to believe that men 
with that one pre-eminent virtue could be so utterly 
hateful as they had been represented ; and when the in- 
tercourse between the races became more unrestrained, 
even the religious asperities of the Crusaders became 
mitigated, they found so many points of resemblance 
between their faiths. There was not an honour which 
the Christian paid to the Yirgin which was not yielded 
by the Mohammedan to Fatima. All the doctrines of 
the Christian creed found their counterparts in the pro- 
fessions of the followers of the Law. Allah was an incar- 
nation of the Deity; and even the mystery of the 
Trinity was not indistinctly seen in the legend of the 
three rays which darted from the idea of Mohammed in 
the mind of the Creator. While this community of 
sentiment softened the animosity of the crusading 
leaders towards their enemies, a still greater community 
of suffering and danger softened their feelings towards 
their followers and retainers. In that scarcity of 
knights and barons, the value of a serf's arm or a 
mechanic's skill was gratefully acknowledged. There 
had been many mutual kindnesses between the two 
classes all through those tedious and blood-stained 
journeys and desperate fights. A peasant had brought 
water to a wounded lord when he lay fainting on the 
burning soil; a workman had had the revelation of the 
true crown : they were no longer the property and 
slaves of the noble, who considered them beings of a 
different blood, but fellow-soldiers, fellow-sufferers, fel- 
low-Christians. They were not spoken of in the insult- 
ing language of the West, and called " our thralls," "our 



272 TWELFTH CENTURY. 

slaves," " our bondsmen ;" at the worst they were called 
" our poor," and lifted by that word into the quality of 
brothers and men. The precepts of the gospel in favour 
of the humble and suffering were felt for the first time 
to have an application to the men who had toiled on 
their lands and laboured in their workshops, but who 
were now their support in the shock of battle, and com- 
panions when the victory was won. Only they were 
poor ; they had no lands ; they had no arms upon their 
shields. So Baldwyn gave them large tracts of country; 
and they became vassals and feudatories for fertile fields 
near Jericho and rich farms on the Jordan. They were 
gentlemen by the strength of their own right hands, as 
the fathers of their lords and suzerains had been. 

But the amalgamation of race and condition was not 
carried on in the East more surely or more extensively 
than in the West. The expenses of preparing for the 
pilgrimage had impoverished the richest of the lords of 
the soil. They had been forced to borrow money and 
to mortgage their estates to the burghers of the great 
commercial towns, which, quietly and unobserved, had 
spread themselves in many parts of France and Italy. 
Genoa had already attained such a height of prosperity 
that she could furnish vessels for the conveyance of half 
the army of the Crusade. In return for her cargoes of 
knights and fighting-men, she brought back the wealth 
of the East, — silks, and precious stones, and spices, and 
vessels of gold and silver. The necessities of the time 
made the money-holder powerful, and the men who 
swung the hammer, and shaped the sword, and em- 
broidered the banner, and wove the tapestry, indis- 
pensable. And what hold, except kindness, and privi- 
lege, and grants of land, had the baron on the skilful 
smith or the ingenious weaver who could carry his skill 
and energy wherever he chose ? Besides, the multitudes 



GAIN OF THE TOWNS. 273 

who had been carried away from the pursuits of indus- 
try to fall at the siege of Antioch or perish by thirst in 
the Desert had given a greatly-increased value to their 
fellow-labourers left at home. While the castle became 
deserted, and all the pomp of feudalism retreated from 
its crumbling walls, the village which had grown in 
safety under its protection flourished as much as ever — 
flourished, indeed, so much that it rapidly became a 
town, and boasted of rich citizens who could help to pay 
off their suzerain's encumbrances and present him with 
an offering on his return. The impoverished and grate- 
ful noble could do no less, in gratitude for gift and con- 
tribution, than secure them in the enjoyment of greater 
franchises and privileges than they had possessed before. 
The Church also gained by the diminished number and 
power of the lords, who had seized upon tithe and offer- 
ing and had looked with disdain and hostility on the 
aggressions of the lower clergy. True to its origin, the 
Church still continued the leader of the people, in op- 
position to the pretensions of the feudal chiefs. It was 
still a democratic organization for the protection of the 
weak against the powerful; and though we have seen 
that the bishops and other dignitaries frequently as- 
sumed the state and practised the cruelties of the grasp- 
ing and illiterate baron, public opinion, especially in the 
North of Europe, was not revolted against these in- 
stances of priestly domination, for whatever was gained 
by the crozier was lost to the sword. It was even a 
consolation to the injured serf to see the truculent land- 
lord who had oppressed him oppressed in his turn by a 
still more truculent bishop, especially when that bishop 
had sprung from the dregs of the people, and — crown 
and consummation of all — when the Pope, God's vice- 
gerent upon earth, who dethroned emperors and made 
kings hold his stirrup as he mounted his mule, was de- 
s 



274 TWELFTH CENTURY. 

scendcd from no more distinguished a family than him- 
self. It was the effort of the Church, therefore, in all 
this century, to lower the noble and to elevate the poor. 
To gain popularity, all arts were resorted to. The 
clergy were the showmen and play-actors of the time. 
The only amusement the labourer could aim at was 
found for him, in rich processions and gorgeous cere- 
mony, by the priest. How could any fault of the abbot 
or prelate turn away the affection of the peasant from 
the Church, which was in a peculiar manner his own 
establishment ? Never had the drunkenness, the de- 
bauchery and personal indulgences of the upper eccle- 
siastics reached such a pitch before. The gluttony of 
friars and monks became proverbial. The community 
of certain monasteries complained of the austerity of 
their abbots in reducing their ordinary dinners from 
sixteen dishes to thirteen. The great St. Bernard de- 
scribes many of the rulers of the Church as keeping sixty 
horses in their stables, and having so many wines upon 
their board that it was impossible to taste one-half of them. 
Yet nothing shook the attachment of the uneducated 
commons. Their priest got up dances and concerts and 
miracles for their edification, and had a right to enjoy all 
the luxuries of life. Once freed, therefore, from the watch- 
ful enmity of lord and king, the Church was well aware 
that its power would be irresistible. The people were de- 
voted to it as their earthly defender against their earthly- 
oppressors, the caterer of all their amusements, and ait 
their guide in the path to heaven. Gratitude and credu- 
Yity, therefore, were equally engaged in its behalf And 
new influences came to its support. .Romance and won- 
der gathered round the champions of the Faith fighting 
in the distant regions of the East. Every thing became 
magnified when seen through the medium of ignorance 
and fanaticism. The tales, therefore, strange enough in 



NEWS FROM PALESTINE. 275 

themselves, which were related by pilgrims returning 
from the Holy Land, and amplified a hundredfold by 
the natural exaggeration of the vulgar, raised higher 
than ever the glory of the Church. The fastings and 
self-inflicted scourgings of holy men, it was believed, 
effected more than the courage of Godfrey or Bohe- 
mund; and even of Godfrey it was said that his ascetic 
life and painful penances caused more losses to the 
enemy than his matchless strength and military skill. 

It would be delightful if we could place ourselves in 
the position of the breathless crowds at that time listen- 
ing for the news from Palestine. No telegraphic de- 
spatch from the Crimea or Hindostan was ever waited 
for with such impatience or received with such emotion. 
The baron summoned the palmer into his hall, and 
heard the strange history of the march to Jerusalem, 
and the crowning of a Christian king, and the creation 
of a feudal court, with a pang, perhaps, of regret that 
he had not joined the pilgrimage, which might have made 
him Duke of Bethlehem or monarch of Tiberias. But 
the peasants in their workshops, or the whole village 
assembled in the long aisles of their church, lent far 
more attentive ears to the wayfaring monk who had es- 
caped from the prison of the Saracen, and told them of 
the marvels accomplished by the bones of martyrs and 
apostles which had been revealed to holy pilgrims in 
their dream on the Mount of Olives. Footprints on the 
heights of Calvary, and portions of the manger in 
Bethlehem, were described in awe-struck voice; and 
when it was announced that in the belt of the narrator, 
enwrapped in a silken scarf, — itself a fabric of incalcu- 
lable worth, — was a hair of an apostle's head, (which 
their lord had purchased for a large sum,) to be de- 
posited upon their altar, they must have thought the 
sacrifices and losses of the Crusade amply repaid. And 



276 TWELFTH CENTURY. 

no amount of these sacred articles seemed in the least 
to diminish their importance. The demand was always 
greatly in advance of the supply, however vast it 
might be. And as the mines of California and Aus- 
tralia have hitherto deceived the prophets of evil, by 
having no perceptible effect on the price of the precious 
metals, the incalculable importation of saints' teeth, and 
holy personages' clothes, and fragments of the true 
Cross, and prickles of the real Crown of Thorns, had no 
depressing effect on the market-value of similar com- 
modities with which all Christian Europe was inundated. 
Faith seemed to expand in proportion as relics became 
plentiful, as credit expands on the security of a supply 
of gold. And as many of those articles were actually 
of as clearly-recognised a pecuniary value as houses or 
lands, and represented in any market or banking-house 
a definite and very considerable sum, it is not too much 
to say that the capital of the West was greatly in- 
creased by these acquisitions from the East. The cup 
of onyx, carved in one stone, which was believed to 
have been that in which the wine of the Last Supper 
was held when our Saviour instituted the Communion, 
was pledged by its owner for an enormous sum, and — 
what is perhaps more strange — was redeemed when the 
term of the loan expired by the repayment of principal 
and interest. The intercourse, therefore, between power 
and money showed that each was indispensable to the 
other. The baron relaxed his severity, and the citizen 
opened his purse-strings; the Church inculcated the 
equality of all men in presence of the altar; and when the 
kings perceived what merchandise might be made of pri- 
vileges and exemptions accorded to their subjects, and how 
at one great blow the townsman's squeezable riches would 
be increased and the baron's local influence diminished, 
there was a struggle between all the crowned heads as to 



RISE OF CITIES. 277 

which should be most favourable to the commons. It was 
in this century, owing to the Crusades, which made the 
commonalty indispensable and the nobility weak, which 
strengthened the Crown and the Church and made it 
their joint interest to restrain the exactions of the feudal 
proprietors, that the liberties of Europe took their rise 
in the establishment of the third estate. In the county 
of Flanders, the great towns had already made them- 
selves so wealthy and independent that it scarcely 
needed a legal ratification of their franchise to make 
them free cities. But in Italy a step further had been 
made, and the great word Republic, which had been 
silent for so many years, had again been heard, and had 
taken possession of the general mind. In spite of the 
opposition and the military successes of Roger, the Nor- 
man king of Sicily, the spirit which animated, those 
great trading communities was never subdued. In 
Yenice itself — the greatest and most illustrious of those 
republics, the first founded and last overthrown — the 
original municipal form of government had never been 
abolished. At all times its liberties had been preserved 
and its laws administered by officers of its own choice, 
and from it proceeded at this time a feeling of social 
equality and an example of commercial prosperity 
which had a strong effect on the nascent freedom of the 
lower and industrious classes over all the world. Genoa 
was not inferior either in liberty or enterprise to any of 
its rivals. Its fleets traversed the Mediterranean, and, 
being equally ready to fight or to trade, brought wealth 
and glory home from the coasts of Greece and Asia. It 
is to be observed that the first reappearance of self- 
government was presented in the towns upon the coast, 
whose situation enabled them to compensate for small- 
ncss of territory by the command of the sea. The 
shores of Italy and the south of France, and the in- 

24 



278 TWELFTH CENTURY. 

dented sea-line of Flanders, followed in this respect the 
example set in former ages by Greece, and Tyre, and 
Pentapolis, and Carthage. There can be no doubt that 
the sight of these powerful communities, governed by 
their consuls and legislated for by their parliamentary 
assemblies, must have put new thoughts into the heads 
of the serfs and labourers returning, in vessels furnished 
by citizens like themselves, from the conquest of Cyprus 
and Jerusalem, where the whole harvest of wealth and 
glory had been reaped by their lords. Encouraged by 
these examples, and by the protection of the King of 
France and Emperor of Germany, the towns in Central 
and Western Europe exerted themselves to emulate the 
republican cities of the South. The nearest approach 
they could hope to the independence they had seen in 
Pisa or Yenice was the possession of the right of elect- 
ing their own magistrates and making their own laws. 
These privileges, we have seen, were insured to them by 
the helplessness and impoverishment of the feudal aris- 
tocracy and the countenance of the Church. 

But the Church towards the middle of this century 
found that the countenance she had given to liberty in 
other places was used as an argument against herself in 
the central seat of her power. Rome, the city of con- 
suls and tribunes, was carried away by the great idea ; 
and under the guidance of Arnold of Brescia, a monk 
who believed himself a Brutus, the standard was again 
hoisted on the Capitol, displaying the magic letters S. 
P. Q. 11., (Senatus Populus que Eomanus.) The Pope 
was expelled by the population, the freedom of the city 
proclaimed, the separation of the spiritual and temporal 
powers pronounced by the unanimous voice, the govern- 
ment of priests abolished, and measures taken to main- 
tain the authority the citizens had assumed. The 
banished Pope had died while these things were going 



WEALTH OF TRADESMEN. 279 

on, and his successor was hunted down the steps of the 
Capitol, and the revolution was accomplished. " Through- 
out the peninsula," says a German historian, " except in 
the kingdom of Naples, from Borne to the smallest city, 
the republican form prevailed." Every thing had con- 
curred to this result, — the force of arms, the rise of com- 
merce, and the glorious remembrance of the past. St. 
Bernard himself acquiesced in the position now occupied 
by the Pope, and he wrote to his scholar Eugenius the 
Third, to " leave the Romans alone, and to exchange the 
city against the world," (" urbem pro orbe mutatam.") 
But the effervescence of the popular will was soon at an 
end. The fear of republicanism made common cause 
between the Pope and Emperor. Frederick Barbarossa 
revenged the indignities cast on the chair of St. Peter 
by burning the rebellious Arnold and re-establishing the 
ancient form of government by force. Yet the spirit 
of equality which was thus repressed by violence fer- 
mented in secret j nor was equality all that was aimed 
at amid some of the swarming seats of population and 
commerce. We find indeed, from this time, that in a 
great number of instances the original relations between 
the town and baron were reversed: the noble put him- 
self under the protection of the municipality, and re- 
ceived its guarantee against the assaults or injuries of 
the prouder and less politic members of his class. It was 
a strange thing to see a feudal lord receive his orders 
from the municipal officers of a country town, and still 
stranger to perceive the low opinion which the courage- 
ous and high-fed burghers entertained of the pomp and 
circumstance of the mailed knights of whom they had 
been accustomed to stand in awe. Their ramparts were 
strong, their granaries well filled, their companions 
stoutly armed ^ and they used to lean over the wall, 
when a. hostile champion summoned them to submit to 



280 TWELFTH CENTURY. 

the exactions of a great proprietor, and watch the 
clumsy charger staggering under his heavy armour, 
with shouts of derision. Men who had thus thrown off 
their hereditary veneration for the lords of the soil, and 
contentedly saw the deposition of the Eoman Pope by 
a Roman Senate and People, were not likely to pay a 
blind submission to the spiritual dictation of their 
priests. In the towns, accordingly, a spirit of free in- 
quiry into the mysteries of the faith began ; and, while 
country districts still heard with awe the impossible 
wonders of the monkish legends, there were rash and 
daring scholars in several countries, who threw doubt 
upon the plainest statements of Revelation. Of these 
the best-known is the still famous Abelard, whose exer- 
tions as a religious inquirer have been thrown into the 
shade by his more interesting character of the hero of 
a love-stOry. The letters of Eloisa, and the unfortunate 
issue of their affection, have kept their names from the 
oblivion which has fallen upon their metaphysical 
triumphs. And yet during their lives the glory of Abe- 
lard did not depend on the passionate eloquence of his 
pupil, but arose from the unequalled sharpness of his 
intellect and his skill in argumentation. Of noble 
family, the handsomest man of his time, wonderful \y 
gifted with talent and accomplishment, he was the first 
instance of a man professing the science of theology 
without being a priest. Wherever he went, thousands 
of enthusiastic scholars surrounded his chair. His 
eloquence was so fascinating that the listener found 
himself irresistibly carried away by the stream; and if 
an opponent was hardy enough to stand up against him, 
the acuteness of his logic was as infallible as the torrent 
of his oratory had been, and in every combat he carried 
away the prize. He doubted about original sin, and 
by implication about the atonement, and many other 



REASONING. 281 

articles of the Christian belief. The power and consti- 
tution of the Church were endangered by the same 
weapons which assailed the groundworks of the faith; 
and yet in all Europe no sufficient champion for truth 
and orthodoxy could be found. Abelard was triumphant 
over all his gainsayers, till at length Bernard of Clair- 
vaux, who even in his lifetime was looked on with the 
veneration due to a saint, who refused an archbishopric, 
and the popedom itself, took up the gauntlet thrown 
down by the lover of Eloisa, and reduced him to silence 
by the superiority of his reasonings and the threats of 
a general council. It is sufficient to remark the appear- 
ance of Abelard in this century, as the commencement 
of a reaction against the dogmatic authority of the 
Church. It was henceforth possible to reason and to 
inquire ; and there can be no doubt that Protestantism 
even in this modified and isolated form had a beneficial 
effect on the establishment it assailed. A new armory 
was required to meet the assaults of dialectic and scholar- 
ship. Dialecticians and scholars were therefore, hence- 
forth, as much valued in the Church as self-flagellating 
friars and miracle-performing saints. The faith was 
now guarded by a noble array of highly-polished intel- 
lects, and the very dogma of the total abnegation of the 
understanding at the bidding of the priest was supported 
by a show of reasoning which few other questions 
had called forth. With the enlargement of the clerical 
sphere of knowledge, refinement in taste and sentiment 
took place. And at this time, as philosophic discussion 
took its rise with Abelard, the ennobling and idealiza- 
tion of woman took its birth contemporaneously with 
the sufferings of Eloisa. Up to this period the Church 
had avowedly looked with disdain on woman, as inherit- 
ing in a peculiar degree the curse of our first parents, 
because she had been the first to break the law. 

24* 



282 TWELFTH CENTURY. 

Knightly gallantly, indeed, had thought proper to ele- 
vate the feminine ideal and clothe with imaginary vir- 
tues the heroines of its fictitious idolatry. It made her 
the aim and arbiter of all its achievements. The prin- 
cipal seat in hall and festival was reserved for the softer 
sex, which hitherto had been considered scarcely worthy 
of reverence or companionship. Perhaps this courtes}^ 
to the ladies on the part of knights and nobles began in 
an opposition to the wife-secluding habits of the Orien- 
tals against whom they fought, as at an earlier date the 
worship of images was certainly maintained by Home 
as a protest against the unadorned worship of the Sara- 
cens. Perhaps it arose from the gradual expansion of 
wealth and the security of life and property, which left 
time and opportunity for the cultivation of the female 
character. Ladies were constituted chiefs of societies 
of nuns, and were obeyed with implicit submission. 
Large communities of young maidens were presided 
over by widows who were still in the bloom of youth; 
and so holy and pure were these sisterhoods considered, 
that brotherhoods and monks were allowed to occupy 
the same house, and the sexes were only separated from 
each other, even at night, by an aged abbot sleeping on 
the floor between them. Though this experiment failed, 
the fact of its being tried proved the confidence in- 
spired by the spotlessness of the female character. 
Other things conspired to give a greater dignity to what 
had been called the inferior sex. The death of whole 
families in the Crusade had left the daughters heiresses 
of immense possessions. In every country but France 
the Crown itself was open to female succession, and it 
was henceforth impossible to affect a superiority over a 
person merely because she was corporeally weak and 
beautiful, who was lady of strong castles and could sum- 
mon a thousand retainers beneath the banners of her 



GREAT FEATURES OF THE CENTURY. 



283 



house. The very elevation of the women with whom, 
they were surrounded — the peeresses, and princesses, 
and even the ladies of lower rank, to whom the voice 
of the troubadours attributed all the virtues under 
heaven — necessitated in the mind of the clergy a cor- 
responding elevation in the character of the queen and 
representative of the female sex, whom they had already 
worshipped as personally without sin and endowed with 
superhuman power. At this time the immaculate con- 
ception of the Holy Yirgin was first broached as an 
article of belief, — a doctrine which, after being dormant 
at intervals and occasionally blossoming into declara- 
tion, has finally received its full ratification by the 
authority of the present Pope, — Pius the Ninth. In the 
twelfth century it was acknowledged and propagated as 
a fresh increase to the glory of the mother of God; but 
it is now fixed forever as indispensable to the salvation 
of every Christian. 

Such, then, are the great features by which to mark 
this century, — the combination of rank with rank caused 
by the mutual danger of lord and serf in the Crusade, 
the rise of freedom by the commercial activity imparted 
by the same cause to the towns, the elevation of the 
idea of woman, without which no true civilization can 
take place. These are the leading and general charac- 
teristics : add to them what we have slightly alluded to, 
— the first specimens of the joyous lays and love-sonnets 
of the young knights returning from Palestine and 
pouring forth their admiration of birth and beauty in 
the soft language of Italy or Languedoc, — the inter- 
course between distant nations, which was indispensable 
in the combined expeditions against the common foe, so 
that the rough German cavalier gathered lessons in 
manner or accomplishment from the more polished 
princes of Anjou or Aquitaine, — and it will be seen that 



284 TWELFTH CENTURY. 



this was the century of awakening mind and softening 
influences. There were scholars like Abelard, intro- 
ducing the hitherto unknown treasures of the Greek 
and Hebrew tongues, and yet presenting the finest 
specimens of gay and accomplished gentlemen, un- 
matched in sweetness of voice and mastery of the harp; 
and there were at the other side of the picture saints 
like Bernard of Clairvaux, not relying any longer on 
visions and the traditionary marvels of the past, but 
displaying the power of an acute diplomatist and wide- 
minded politician in the midst of the most extraordinary 
self-denial and the exercises of a rigorous asceticism, 
which in former ages had been limited to the fanatical 
and insane. To this man's influence was owing the 
a.d. 1147. Second Crusade, which occurred in 1147. Dif- 
ferent from the first, which had been the result 
of popular enthusiasm and dependent for its success on 
undisciplined numbers and religious fury, this was a 
great European and Christian movement, concerted 
between the sovereigns and ratified by the peoples. 
Kings took the command, and whole nations bestowed 
their wealth and influence on the holy cause. Louis the 
Seventh of France led all the paladins of his land; and 
Conrad, the German Emperor, collected all the forces of 
the West to give the finishing-blow to the power of the 
Mohammedans and restore the struggling kingdom 
of Jerusalem. Seventy thousand horsemen and two 
hundred and fifty thousand foot-soldiers were the 
smallest part of the array. Whole districts were de- 
populated by the multitudes of artificers, shopmen, 
women, children, buffoons, mimics, priests, and coujurers 
who accompanied the march. It looked like one of the 
great movements which convulsed the Eoman Empire 
when Goths or Burgundians poured into the land. But 
the results were nearly tho same as in the days of God 









THIRD CRUSADE. 28 5 

frey and Bohemund. Yalour and discipline, national 
emulation and knightly skill, were of no avail against 
climate and disease. Again the West astonished the 
Turks with the impetuosity of its courage and the dis- 
play of its hosts, but lay weakened and exhausted when 
the convulsive effort was past. A million perished in 
the useless struggle. Forty years scarcely sufficed to 
restore the nobility to sufficient power to undertake 
another suicidal attempt. But in 1191 the 
Third Crusade departed under the conduct of 
Bichard of England, and earned the same glory and un- 
success. The century was weakened by those wretched 
but not fruitless expeditions, which, in round numbers, 
cost two millions of lives, and produced such memorable 
effects on the general state of Europe j yet it will be 
better remembered by us if we direct our attention to 
some of the incidents which have a more direct bearing 
on our own country. Of these the most remarkable is 
the commencement of the long-continued enmity be- 
tween France and England, of the wars which lasted so 
many years, which made our most eminent politicians 
at one time believe that the countries were natural 
enemies, incapable of permanent union or even of mutual 
respect; and these took their rise, as most great wars 
have done, from the paltriest causes, and were continued 
on the most unfounded pretences. 

Henry the First was the son of William the Con- 
queror. On the death of his brother William Eufus he 
seized the English crown, though the eldest of the family, 
Eobert, was still alive. Eobert was fond of fighting 
without the responsibility of command, and delighted 
to be religious without the troubles of a religious life. 
He therefore joined the First Crusade to gratify this 
double desire, and mortgaged his dukedom of Nor- 
mandy to Henry to supply him with horses and arms 



286 



TWELFTH CENTURY. 



and enable him to support his dignity as a Christian 
prince at Jerusalem. His dukedom he never could re- 
cover, for his extravagances prevented him from repay- 
ment of the loan. He tried to reconquer it by force, 
but was defeated at the battle of Tinchebray, and was 
guarded by the zealous affection of his brother all the 
rest of his life in the Tower of London. He left a son, 
who was used as an instrument of assault against Henry 
by the Suzerain of Normandy, Louis the Sixth, King of 
France. Orders were issued to the usurping feudatory 
to resign his possessions into the hands of the rightful 
heir; but, however obedient the Duke of Normandy 
might profess to be to his liege lord the King of France, 
the King of England held a very different language, 
,.,„„ and took a different estimate of his position. 

A.D. 1153. , , x 

And in the time of the second Henry a change 
took place in their respective situations which seemed 
to justify the assumptions of the English king. That 
grandson of Henry the First had opposed his liege lord 
of France by arms and arts, and at last by one great 
master-stroke turned his own arms upon his rival and 
strengthened himself on his spoils. In the Second 
Crusade the scrupulous delicacy of Louis the Seventh 
of France had been revolted by the indiscreet or guilty 
conduct of Eleanor his wife. He repudiated her as un- 
worthy of his throne; and Henry, who had no delicacies 
of conscience when they interfered with his interest, 
offered the rejected Eleanor his hand; for she continued 
the undoubted mistress of Poitou and Guienne. ]STo 
stain derived from her principles or conduct was re- 
flected in the eyes of the ambitious Henry on those 
noble provinces, and from henceforth his Continental 
possessions far exceeded those of his suzerain. The 
other feudatories, encouraged by this example, owned a 
very modified submission to their nominal head; and 



THE PLANTAGENETS. 287 

the inheritors of the throne of the Capets were again 
reduced to the comparative weakness of their predeces- 
sors of the Carlovingian line. Yet there was one 
element of vitality of which the feudal barons had not 
deprived the king. A fief, when it lapsed for want of 
heirs, was reattached to the Crown ; and in the turmoil 
and adventure of those unsettled times the extinction 
of a line of warriors and pilgrims was not an uncommon 
event. Even while a family was numerous and healthy, 
the uncertain nature of their possession deprived it of 
half its value, for at the end of that gallant line of 
knights and cavaliers, slain as they might be in battle, 
carried off by the pestilences which were usual at that 
period, or wasted away in journeys to the Holy Land 
and sieges in the heats of Palestine, stood the feudal 
king, ready to enter into undisputed possession of the 
dukedoms or counties which it had cost them so much 
time and danger to make independent and strong. In 
the case of Normandy or Guienne themselves, Louis 
might have looked without much uneasiness on the 
building of castles and draining of marshes, when he 
reflected that but a life or two lay between him and the 
enriched and strengthened fief; and when those lives 
were such desperadoes as Richard and such cowards as 
John, the prospect did not seem hopeless of an imme- 
diate succession. But the French kings were still more 
fortunate in being opposed to such unamiable rivals as the 
coarse and worldly descendants of the Conqueror. The 
personal characters of those men, however their energy 
and courage might benefit them in actual war, made 
them feared and hated wherever they were known. 
They were sensual, cruel, and unprincipled to a degree 
unusual even in those ages of rude manners and unde- 
veloped conscience. Their personal appearance itself 
was an index of the ungovernable passions within. 



288 TWELFTH CENTURY. 



Fat, broad-shouldered, low-staturcd, red-haired, loud 
voiced, they were frightful to look upon even in their 
calmest moods; but when the Conqueror stormed, no 
feeling of ruth or reverence stood in his way. When 
he was refused the daughter of the Count of Boulogne, 
he forced his way into the chamber of the countess,' 
seized her by the hair of her head, dragged her round' 
the room, and stamped on her with his feet. Eobert 
his son was of the same uninviting exterior. William 
Eufus was little and very stout. Henry the Second was 
gluttonous and debauched. Eichard the Lion-Heart 
was cruel as the animal that gave him name ; and John 
was the most debased and contemptible of mankind. A 
race of gentle and truthful men, on the other hand, 
ennobled the crown of France. The kings, from Louis 
the Debonnaire to Louis the Seventh, or Young, were 
favourites of the Church and champions of the people. 
The harsh and violent nobility despised them, but they 
were venerated in the huts where poor men lie. The 
very scruple which induced Louis to divorce his wife, 
whose conduct had stained the purity of the Crusade, 
almost repaid the loss of her great estates by the in- 
creased love and respect of his subjects. And when the 
line of pure and honourable rulers was for a while in- 
a.d. 118O. tcri ' u P ted D y the appearance, upon a throne so 
long established in equity, of an armed warrior 
in the person of Philip Augustus, it was felt that the 
sword was at last in the hands of an avenger, who was 
to execute the decrees of Heaven upon the enemies 
whom the moderation, justice, and mercy of his prede- 
cessors had failed to move. 

But before we come to the personal relations of the 
French and English kings we must take a rapid view 
of one of the great incidents by which this century is 
marked,— an incident which for a long time attracted 



A-BECKETT. 289 



the notice of all Europe, and was productive of very im- 
portant consequences within our own country. Hitherto 
England had played the part of a satellite to the Court 
of Borne. Previous to the quarrels with France, indeed, 
one great tie between her and the Continental nations 
was the community of their submission to the Pope. 
Foreigners have at all times found wealth and kind 
treatment here. Germans, Italians, Frenchmen, any 
one who could make interest with the patrons of large 
livings, held rank and honours in the English Church. 
Little enough, it was felt, was all that could be done in 
d. 1154 behalf of foreign ecclesiastics to repay them for 
-U59. the condescension they showed in elevating 
Nicholas Breakspear, an Anglo-Saxon of St. Alban's, to 
the papal chair. But Nicholas, in taking another name, 
lost his English heart. As Adrian the Fourth, he pre- 
ferred Eome to England, and maintained his authority 
with as high a hand as any of his predecessors. Knights 
and nobles, and even the higher orders of the clergy, 
were at length discontented with the continual exactions 
of the Holy See; and in 1162 the same battle which had 
agitated the world between Henry the Fourth of Ger- 
many and Gregory the Seventh was fought out in a still 
bitterer spirit between Henry the Second of England 
and Thomas a-Beckett. All the story-books of English 
history have told us the romantic incidents of the birth 
of the ambitious priest. It is possible the obscurity of 
his origin was concealed by his contemporaries under 
the interesting legend, which must have been a very 
early subject for the fancy of the poet and troubadour, 
of a love between a Bed-Cross pilgrim and a Saracen 
emir's daughter. It shows a remarkable softening of 
the ancient hatred to the infidels, that the votaress of 
Mohammed should have been chosen as the mother of a 
saint. But whatever doubt there may arise about the 
T 25 



290 TWELFTH CENTURY. 

reality of the deserted maiden's journey in search of her 
admirer, and her discovery of his abode by the mere 
reiteration of his name, which is beautifully said to be 
the only word of English she remembered, there is no 
doubt of the early favour which the young Anglo-Sara- 
cen attained with the king, or of the desire the sagacious 
Henry entertained to avail himself of the great talents 
which made his favourite delightful as a companion and 
indispensable as a chancellor, in the higher position still 
of Archbishop of Canterbury and Comptroller of the 
English Church. For high pretensions were put forward 
by the clergy : they insisted upon the introduction of the 
canon laws j they claimed exemption from trial by civil 
process ; they were to be placed beyond the reach of the 
ordinary tribunals, and were to be under their own 
separate rulers, and directly subject in life and property 
to the decrees of Rome. 

Henry knew but one man in his dominions able to 
contend in talent and acuteness with the advocates of 
the Church, and that was his chancellor and friend, the 
gay and generous and affectionate a-Beckett. So one 
day, without giving him much time for preparation, he 
persuaded him to be made a priest, and at the same 
moment named him Archbishop of Canterbury and 
Primate of all England. Now, he thought, we have a 
champion who will do battle in our cause and stand up 
for the liberties of his native land. But a-Beckett had 
dressed himself in a hair shirt and flogged himself with 
an iron scourge. He had invited the holiest of the 
priests to favour him with their advice, and had thrown 
himself on his knees on the approach of the most ascetic 
of the monks and friars. All his fine establishments 
were broken up ; his horses were sent away; his silver 
table-services sold ; and the new archbishop fasted on 
bread and water and lay on the hard floor. Henry was 



FAILURE OF THE KING. 291 

astonished and uneasy; and he had soon very good 
cause for his uneasiness, for his favourite orator, his 
boon-companion, his gallant chancellor, from whom he 
had expected support and victory, turned against him 
with the most ruthless animosity, and pushed the pre- 
tensions of Home to a pitch they had never reached 
before. Nobody, however he may blame the double- 
dealing or the ambition of a-Beckett, can deny him the 
praise of personal courage in making opposition to the 
king. The Norman blood was as hot in him as in any 
of his predecessors. When he got into a passion, we 
are told by a contemporary chronicler, his blue eyes 
became filled with blood. In a fit of rage he bit a page's 
shoulder. A favourite servant having contradicted him, 
he rushed after the man on the stair, and, not being 
able to catch him, gnawed the straw upon the boards. 
We may therefore guess with what feelings the injured 
Plantagenet received the behaviour of his newly-created 
primate. He stormed and raged, terrified the other 
prelates to join him in his measures for curbing the 
power of the Church, chafed himself for several years 
against the unconquerable firmness of the arrogant arch- 
bishop, and finally failed in every object he had aimed 
at. The violence of the king was met with the affected 
resignation of the sufferer; and at last, when the im- 
patience of Henry gave encouragement to his followers 
to put the refractory priest to death, the quarrel was 
lifted out of the ordinary category of a dispute between 
the crown and the crozier : it became a combat between 
a wilful and irreligious tyrant and a martyred saint. It 
requires us to enter into the feelings of the twelfth cen- 
tury to be able to understand the issue of this great con- 
flict. In our own day the assumptions of a-Beckett, and 
his claims of exemption from the ordinary laws, have 
no sympathizers among the lovers of progress or 



2U2 TWELFTH CENTURY. 

freedom. But in the time of the second Henry the only 
chance of either, in England, was found under the 
shelter of the Church. That great establishment was 
still the only protection against the lawless violence of 
the king and nobles. The Norman possessors of the 
land were still an army encamped on hostile soil and 
levying contributions by the law of the strong hand. 
Disunion had not yet arisen between the sovereign and 
his lords, except as to the division of the spoil. The 
Crusades had not depopulated England to the same ex- 
tent as some of the other countries in Europe ; and the 
wars of the troubled days of Stephen and Matilda, 
though fatal to the prosperity of the land, and destruc- 
tive of many of the nobles on either side, had attracted 
an immense number of high-born and strong-handed 
adventurers, who amply supplied their place. The 
clergy had been forced to retain their original position 
as leaders of the popular mind, superintendents of the 
interests of their flocks, and teachers and comforters of 
the oppressed: a-Beckett, therefore, was not in their 
eyes an ambitious priest, sacrificing every thing for the 
elevation of his order. He was a champion fighting the 
battles of the poor against the rich, — a ransomer of at 
least one powerful body in the State from the capricious 
cruelty of Henry and the grasping avarice of the Nor- 
man spoliation. The down-trodden Saxons received 
with the transports of gratified revenge any humilia- 
tion inflicted on the proud aristocracy which had thriven 
on the ruin of their ancestors. The date of the Con- 
quest was not yet so distant as to hinder the feeling of 
personal wrong from mingling in the conflict between 
the races. A man of sixty remembered the story told 
him by his father of his dispossession of holt and field, 
on which the old manor-house had stood since Alfred's 
days, and which now had been converted into a crene- 



SYMPATHY WITH A-BECKETT. 293 

lated tower by the foreign conqueror. Nor arc we to 
forget, in the midst of the idea of antiquity conveyed 
at the present time by the fact of a person's ancestor 
having " come in with William," that the bitterness of 
dispossession was increased in the eyes of the long-de- 
scended Saxon franklin by the lowness of his disposses- 
sor's birth. Half the roll-call of the Norman army was 
made up of the humblest names, — barbers and smiths, 
and tailors and valets, and handicraftsmen of all descrip- 
tions. And yet, seated in his fortified keep, supported 
by the sixty thousand companions of his success, en- 
riched by the fertile harvests of his new domain, this 
upstart adventurer filled the wretched cottages of the 
land with a distressed and starving peasantry; and 
where were those friendless and helpless outcasts to 
look for succour and consolation ? They found them in 
the Church. Their countrymen generally filled the 
lower offices, speaking in good Saxon, and feeling as 
good Saxons should ; while the lordly abbot or luxurious 
bishop kept high state in his monastery or palace, and 
gave orders in Norman French with feelings as foreign 
as his tongue. But a-Beckett was an Englishman; 
a-Beckett was Archbishop of Canterbury, and chief of 
all the churchmen in the land. To honour a-Beckett 
was to protest against the Conquest; and when the 
crowning glory came, and the crimes of Henry against 
themselves attained their full consummation in the mur- 
der of the prelate at the altar, — the patriot in his resist- 
ance to oppression, — the enthusiasm of the country knew 
no bounds. The penitential pilgrimage which the proud- 
est of the Plantagenets made to the tomb of his victim 
was but small compensation for so enormous a wicked- 
ness, and for ages the name of a-Beckett was a house- 
hold word at the hearths of the English peasantry, as 
their great representative and deliverer, — only complet- 

25* 



294 TWELFTH CENTURY. 

ing the care he took of their temporal interests while 
on earth by the superintendence he bestowed on their 
spiritual benefit now that he was a saint in heaven. 
Curses fell upon the head and heart of the royal mur- 
derer, as if by a visible retribution. His children re- 
belled and died; the survivors were false and hostile. 
Bichard, who had the one sole virtue of animal courage, 
was incited by his mother to resist his father, and was 
joined in his unnatural rebellion by his brother John, 
who had no virtue at all. His mind, before he died, had 
lost the energy which kept the sceptre steady ; and the 
century went down upon the glory of England, which 
lay like a wreck upon the water, and was stripped 
gradually, and one by one, of all the possessions which 
had made it great, and even the traditions of military 
power which had made it feared. John was on the 
throne, and the nation in discontent. 



THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 



IBmperocs of (gennang. IBmpecots of (ftonstanttnoplc. 



A.D. 



1212. 
1247. 
1257. 
1257. 
1273. 
1291. 
1298. 



Otho, (of Brunswick.) — 

(cont.) 
Frederick II. 
William, (of Holland.) 
Eichard, (of Cornwall.) 
Alphonso, (of Castile.) 
Eodolph, (of Hapsburg. 
Adolph, (of Nassau.) 
Albert I., (of Austria.) 



Ittngs of ^France- 

Philip Augustus. — (cont. ) 
1223. Louis VIII. 
1226. Louis IX., (the Fat.) 
1270. Philip III., (the Hardy.) 

1285. Philip IV., (the Hand- 

some.) 

ICingis ef Scotland. 

William. — (cont. ) 
1214. Alexander II. 
1249. Alexander III. 

1286. Margaret. 

1291. John Baliol, deposed 
1296. 



A.D. 

1203. Isaac. 

1204. Alexis IV. 

1204. Due as, (Usurper,) de- 
throned by warriors 
of Fourth Crusade. 

Latin Empire. 

1204. Baldwyn, (of Flanders.) 

1206. Henry, (his brother.) 

1216. Peter, (of Courtney.) 

1219. Eobert, (his son.) 

1228. John, (of Brienne.) 

1231. Baldwyn. 

Greek Empire of Nicoza* 
1222. John Ducas. 
1255. Teleodorus II. 
1261. John Lascaris — retakes 

Constantinople. 
1261. Michael. 
1282. Andronicus II. 

livings of iSnglanfc, 

John. — (cont.) 
1216. Henry III. 
1276. Edward I. 



1201. Fourth Crusade. 
1217. Fifth Crusade. 
1228. Sixth Crusade. 



1248. Seventh Crusade. 
1270. Eighth and Last Crusade, 
by St. Louis against Tunis. 

Eutfjors. 

Roger Bacon, Matthew Paris, Alexander Hales, (Irrefra- 
gable Doctor,) Thomas Aquinas, (the Angelic Doctor.) 



THE THIRTEENTH CENTUEY. 

FIRST CRUSADE AGAINST HERETICS — THE ALBIGENSES — 
MAGNA CHARTA EDWARD I. 

The progress and enlightenment of Europe proceed 
from this period at a constantly-increasing rate. The 
rise of commercial cities, the weakening of the feudal 
aristocracy, the introduction of the learning of the Sara- 
cenic schools, and the growth of universities for the 
cultivation of science and language, contributed greatly 
to the result. Another cause used to be assigned for 
this satisfactory advance, in the discovery which had 
been made in the last century at Amain, of a copy of 
the long-forgotten Pandects of Justinian, and the rein- 
troduction of the Boman laws, in displacement of the 
conflicting customs and barbarous enactments of the 
various states ; but the fact of the continued existence 
of the Eoman Institutes is not now denied, though it is 
probable that the discovery of the Amain manuscript 
may have given a fresh impulse to the improvement of 
the local codes. But an increase of mental activity had 
at first its usual regretable accompaniment in the con- 
temporaneous rise of dangerous and unfounded opinions. 
Philosophy, which began with an admiration of the skill 
and learning of Aristotle, ended by enthroning him as 
the uncontrolled master of human reason. Wherever 
he was studied, all previous standards of faith and argu- 
ment were overthrown. The cleverest intellects of the 
time could find themselves no higher task than to re- 
concile the Christian Scriptures with the decrees of the 

297 



298 THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 

Stagyrite, for it was felt that in the case of an irrecon- 
cilable divergence between the teaching of Christ and 
of Aristotle the scholars of Christendom would have 
pronounced in favour of the Greek. A formulary, 
indeed, was found out for the joint reception of both ; 
many statements were declared to be " true in philoso- 
phy though false in religion," so that the most orthodox 
of Churchmen could receive the doctrines of the Church 
by an act of belief, while he gave his whole affection to 
Aristotle by an act of the understanding. When teachers 
and preachers tamper with the human conscience, the 
common feelings of honour and fair play revolt at the 
degrading attempt. Men of simple minds, who did not 
profess to understand Aristotle and could not be blinded 
by the subtleties of logic, endeavoured to discover "the 
more excellent way" for themselves, but were bewildered 
by the novelty of their search for Truth. There were 
mystic dreamers who saw God everywhere and in every 
thing, and counted human nature itself a portion of the 
Deity, or maintained that it was possible for man to 
attain a share of the divine by the practice of virtue. 
This Pantheism gave rise to numerous displa} T s of popu- 
lar ignorance and impressibility. Messiahs appeared in 
many parts of Europe, and were followed by great mul- 
titudes. Some enthusiasts taught that a new dispensa- 
tion was opening upon man ; that God was the Gover- 
nor of the world during the Old Testament period; 
that Christ had reigned till now, but that the reign of 
the. Holy Spirit was about to commence, and all things 
would be renewed. Others, more hardy, declared their 
adhesion to the Persian principle of a duality of persons 
in heaven, and revived the old Manichean heresy that 
the spirit of Hatred was represented in the Jewish 
Scriptures and the spirit of Love in the Christian; that 
the Good god had created the soul, and the Evil god 



ALBIGENSES. 299 

the body, — on which were justified the sufferings they 
voluntarily inflicted on the workmanship of Satan, and 
the starvings and flagellations required to bring it into 
subjection. This belief found few followers, and would 
have died out as rapidly as it had arisen ; but the malig- 
nity of the enemies of any change found it convenient 
to identify those wild enthusiasts with a very different 
class of persons who at this time rose into prominent 
notice. The rich counties of the South of France were 
always distinguished from the rest of the nation by the 
possession of greater elegance and freedom. The old 
Roman civilization had never entirely deserted the 
shores of the Mediterranean or the valleys of Langue- 
doc and Provence. In Languedoc a sect of strange 
thinkers had given voice to some startling doctrines, 
which at once obtained the general consent. Toulouse 
was the chief encourager of these new beliefs, and in its 
hostility to Borne was supported by its reigning sovereign, 
Count .Raymond YI. This potentate, from the position 
of his States, — abutting upon Barcelona, where the 
Spaniards, who remembered their recent emancipation 
from the Mohammedan yoke, were famous for their 
tolerance of religious dissent, — and deriving the greater 
portion of his wealth from the trade and industry of the 
Jews and Arabs established in his seaport towns, saw 
no great evil in the principles professed by his people. 
Those principles, indeed, when stripped of the malicious 
additions of his enemies, were not different from the 
creed of Protestantism at the present time. They con- 
sisted merely of a complete denial of the sovereignty 
of the Pope, the power of the priesthood, the efficacy 
of prayers for the dead, and the existence of purgatory. 
The other princes of the South looked on religion as a 
mere instrument for the advancement of their own in- 
terests, and would have imitated the greater sovereigns 



300 



THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 



of Europe, several of whom for a very slender considera- 
tion would have gone openly over to the standard of 
Mohammed. The inhabitants, therefore, of those opu- 
lent regions, by the favour of Raymond and the indif- 
ference of the rest, were left for a long time to their 
own devices, and gave intimation of a strong desire to 
break off their connection with the hierarchy of Rome. 
And no wonder they were tired of their dependence on 
so grasping and unprincipled a power as the Church had 
proved to them. More depraved and more exacting in 
this district than in any other part of Europe, the clergy 
had contrived to alienate the hearts of the common 
people without gaining the friendship of the nobility. 
Equally hated by both, — despised for their sensuality, 
and no longer feared for their spiritual power, — the 
priests could offer no resistance to the progress of the 
new opinions. Those opinions were in fact as much due 
to the vices of the clergy as to the convictions of the 
congregations. Any thing hostile to Rome was wel- 
comed by the people. A musical and graceful language 
had grown up in Languedoc, which was universally 
recognised as the fittest vehicle for descriptions of 
beauty and declarations of love, and had been found 
equally adapted for the declamations of political hatred 
and denunciations of injustice. But now the whole 
guild of troubadours, ceasing to dedicate their muses to 
ladies' charms or the quarrels of princes, poured forth 
their indignation in innumerable songs on their clerical 
oppressors. The infamies of the whole order — the monks 
black and white, the deacons, the abbots, the bishops, 
the ordinary priests — were now married to immortal 
verse. Their spoiling of orphans, their swindling of 
widows and wards, their gluttony and drunkenness, 
were chronicled in every township, and were incapable 
of denial. Their dishonesty became proverbial. The 



DOMINIC. 301 

simplest peasant, on hearing of a scandalous action, was 
in the habit of saying, "I would rather be a priest than 
be guilty of such a deed." But there were two men 
then alive exactly adapted to meet the exigencies of the 
time. One was a noble Castilian of the name of Dominic 
Guzman, who had become disgusted with the world, and 
had taken refuge from temptations and strife among the 
brethren of a reformed cathedral in Spain. But tempta- 
tions and strife forced their way into the cells of Asma, 
and the eloquent friar was torn away from his prayers 
and penances and brought prominently forward by the 
backslidings of the men of Languedoc. The saturnine 
aod self-sacrificing Spaniard had no sympathy with the 
joyous proceedings of the princes and merchants of the 
South. He saw sin in their enjoyment even of the gifts 
of nature, — their gracious air and beautiful scenery. 
How much more when the gayety of their meetings 
was enlivened by interludes throwing ridicule on the 
pretensions of the bishops, by hootings at any ecclesiastic 
who presented himself in the street, and by sneers and 
loud laughter at the predictions and miracles with which 
the Church resisted their attack ! The unbelieving 
populace did not spare the personal dignity of the mis- 
sionary himself. They pelted him with mud, and fixed 
long tails of straw at the back of his robe; they out- 
raged all the feelings of his heart, his Castilian pride, 
his Christian belief, his clerical obedience. There is no 
denying the energy with which he exerted himself to 
recall those wandering sheep to the true fold. His 
biographer tells us of the successes of his eloquence, 
and of the irresistible effect of the inexhaustible foun- 
tain of tears with which he inundated his face till they 
formed a river down to his robes. His writings, we are 
assured, being found unanswerable by the heretics, 
were submitted to the ordeal of fire. Twice they re- 

26 



302 THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 

sisted the hottest flames which could be raised by wood 
and brimstone, and still without converting the incredu- 
lous subjects of Count Raymond. His miracles, which 
were numerous and undeniable, also had no effect. 
Even his prayers, which seem to have moved houses 
and walls, had no efficacy in moving the obdurate 
hearts of the unbelievers; and at last, tired out with 
their recalcitrancy, the dreadful word was spoken. He 
cursed the men of Languedoc, the inhabitants of its 
towns, the knights and gentlemen who received his 
oratory with insult, and in. addition to his own anathemas 
called in the spiritual thunder of the Pope. 

This was the other man peculiarly fitted for the work he 
had to do. His cruelty would have done no dishonour 
to the blood-stained scutcheon of Nero, and his ambition 
transcended that of Gregory the Seventh. His name was 

„„„,. Innocent the Third. For one-half of the crimes 
a.d. 1207. 

alleged against those heretics, who, from their 
principal seat in the diocese of Albi, were known as Albi- 
genses, he would have turned the whole of France into a 
desert; and when, with greedy ear, he heard the denun- 
ciations of Dominic, he declared war on the devoted pea- 
sants, — war on the consenting princes; a holy war — more 
meritorious than a Crusade against the Turks and infidels 
— where no life was to be spared, and where houses and 
lands were to be the reward of the assailants. All the wild 
spirits of the age were wakened by the call. It was a pil- 
grimage where all expenses were paid, without the danger 
of the voyage to the East or the sword of the Sarapen. 
Foremost among those who hurried to this mingled har- 
vest of money and blood, of religious absolution and mili- 
tary fame, was the notorious Simon do Montfort, a man 
fitted for the commission of any wickedness requiring a 
powerful arm and unrelenting heart. Forward from all 
quarters of Europe rushed the exterminating emissaries 



DE MONTFORT. 303 

of the Pope and soldiers of Dominic. " You shall ravage 
every field; you shall slay every human being: strike, 
and spare not. The measure of their iniquity is full, and 
the blessing of the Church is on your heads." These 
words, sung in sweet chorus by the Pope and the Monk, 
were the instructions on which De Montfort was pre- 
pared to act; and what could the sunny Languedoc, 
the land of song and dance, of olive-yard and vineyard, 
do to repel this hostile inroad ? Suddenly all the music 
of the troubadours was hushed in dreadful expectation. 
.Raymond was alarmed, and tried to temporize. Pro- 
mises were made and explanations given, but without 
any offer of submission to the yoke of Pome : so the 
„„ An infuriated warriors came on, burning, slaving:, 

A.D. 1208. / to7 , J t> ' 

ravaging, in terms of their commission, till 
Dominic himself grew ashamed of such blood-stained 
missionaries ; and when their slaughters went on, when 
they had murdered half the population in cold blood, 
and ridden down the peasantry whom despair had sum- 
moned to the defence of their houses and properties, the 
saintly-minded Spaniard could no longer honour their 
hideous butcheries with his presence. He contented 
himself with retiring to a church and praying for the 
good cause with such zeal and animation that De Mont- 
fort and eleven hundred of his ruffians put to flight a 
hundred thousand of the armed soldiers of the South, 
who felt themselves overthrown and scattered by an in- 
visible power. Yet not even the prayers of Dominic 
could keep the outraged people in unresisting acquies- 
cence. Simon de Montfort was expelled from the ter- 
ritories he had usurped, and found a mysterious death 
under the walls of Toulouse in 1218. 

The old family was restored in the person of Eay- 

1ono mond the Seventh, and preparations made for 
a.d. 1223. ' l r 

defence. But Louis the Eighth of France came 



304 THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 

to the aid of the infuriated Pope. Two hundred thou- 
sand men followed in the holy campaign. All the 
atrocities of the former time were renewed and sur- 
passed. Town after town yielded, for all the defenders 
had died. Pestilence broke out in the invading force, 
and Louis himself was carried off by fever. Champions, 
however, were ready in all quarters to carry on the 
glorious cause. Louis the Ninth was now King of 
France, and under the government of his mother, 
Blanche of Castile, the work commenced by her country- 
man was completed. The final victory of the crusaders 
and punishment of the rebellious were celebrated by the 
introduction of the Inquisition, of which the ferocious 
Dominic was the presiding spirit. The fire of persecu- 
tion under his holy stirrings burnt up what the sword 
of the destroyer had left, and from that time the voice 
of rejoicing was heard no more in Languedoc: her free- 
dom of thought and elegance of sentiment were equally 
crushed into silence by the heel of persecution. The 
"gay science" perished utterly; the very language in 
which the sonnets of knight and troubadour had been 
composed died away from the literatures of the earth j 
and Rome rejoiced in the destruction of poetry and the 
restoration of obedience. This is a very mark-worthy 
incident in the thirteenth century, as it is the first ex- 
periment, on a great scale, which the Church made to 
retain her supremacy by force of arms. The pagan and 
infidel, the denier of Christ and the enemies of his 
teaching, had hitherto been the objects of the wrath of 
Christendom. This is the first instance in which a dif- 
ference of opinion between Christians themselves bad 
been the ground for wholesale extermination; for those 
unfortunate Albigenses acknowledged the divinity of 
the Saviour and professed to be his disciples. It is the 
crowning proof of the totally-secularized nature of the es- 



PEACE OF LANGUEDOC. 305 

tabl ished faith . Its weapons wore no longer argument and 
proof, or even persuasion and promise. The horse up to 
his fetlocks in blood, the sword waved in the air, the tramp- 
ling of marshalled thousands, were henceforth the sup- 
ports of the religion of love and charity; and fires 
glowing in every market-place and dungeons gaping in 
every episcopal castle were henceforth the true exposi- 
tors of the truth as it is in Jesus. Fires, indeed, and 
dungeons, were required to compensate for the incom- 
pleteness, as it appeared to the truly orthodox, of the 
vengeance inflicted on the rebels. The Abbot of 
Citeaux, who gave his spiritual and corporeal aid to the 
assault on Beziers, was for a moment made uneasy by 
the difficulty his men experienced in distinguishing be- 
tween the heretics and believers at the storm of the 
town. At last he got out of the difficulty by saying, 
" Slay them all! The Lord will know his own." The 
same benevolent dignitary, when he wrote an account 
of his achievement to the Pope, lamented that he had 
only been able to cut the throats of twenty thousand. 
And Gregory the Ninth would have been better pleased 
if it had been twice the number. "His vast revenue 
had stomach for them all," and already a quarter of a 
million of the population were the victims of his anger. 
Every thing had prospered to his hand. Raymond was 
despoiled of the greater portion of his estates, the voice 
of opposition was hushed, the castles of the nobles con- 
fiscated to the Church; and yet, when the treaty of 
Meaux, in 1229, by which the war was concluded, came 
to be considered, it was perceived that the pacification 
of Languedoc turned not so much to the profit of Rome 
as of the rapidly-coalescing monarchy of France. 

Long before this, in 1204, Philip Augustus had found 
little difficulty in tearing the continental possessions of 
the English crown, except Guienne, from the trembling 
U 26* 



306 THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 

hands of John. The possession of Normandy had already 
made France a maritime power; and now, by the acqui- 
sition of the Narbonnais and Maguelonne from Raymond 
the Seventh, she not only extended her limits to the 
Mediterranean, but, by the extinction of two such vas- 
sals as the Count of Toulouse and the Duke of Nor- 
mandy, incalculably strengthened the royal crown. Ex- 
tinguished, indeed, was the power of Toulouse ; for by 
the same treaty the unfortunate Raymond bought his 
peace with Rome by bestowing the county of Venaissin 
and half of Avignon on the Holy See. These sacrifices 
relieved him from the sentence of excommunication, 
and made him the best-loved son of the Church, and the 
poorest prince in Christendom. 

While monarchy was making such strides in France, 
a counterbalancing power was formed in England by 
the combination of the nobility and the rise of the 
House of Commons. The story of Magna Charta is so 
well known that it will be sufficient to recall some of its 
principal incidents, which could not with propriety be 
omitted in an account of the important events of the 
thirteenth century. No event, indeed, of equal import- 
ance occurred in any other country of Europe. How- 
ever more startling a crusade or a victory might be at 
the time, the results of no single incident have ever been 
so enduring or so wide-spread as those of the meeting 
of the barons at Runnymede and the summoning of the 
burgesses to Parliament. 

The whole reign of John (1199-1216) is a tale of 
wickedness and degradation. Richard of the Lion- 
Heart had been cruel and unprincipled ; but the sharp- 
ness of his sword threw a sort of respectability over the 
•.worst portions of his character. His practical talents, 
also, and the romantic incidents of his life, his confine- 
ment, and even of his death, lifted him out of the ordi- 



JOHN OF ENGLAND. 307 

nary category of brutal and selfish kings and converted 
a very ferocious warrior into a popular hero. But John 
was hateful and contemptible in an equal degree. He 
deserted his father, he deceived his brother, he murdered 
his nephew, he oppressed his people. He had the pride 
that made enemies, and wanted the courage to fight 
them. A knight without truth, a king without justice, 
a Christian without faith, — all classes rebelled against 
him. Innocent the Third scented from afar the advan- 
tage he might obtain from a monarch whose nobility 
despised him and who was hated by his people. And 
when John got up a quarrel about the nomination of an 
archbishop to Canterbury, the Pope soon saw that 
though Langton was no a-Beckett, still less was John 
a Henry the Second. A sentence of excommunication 
was launched at the coward's head, and the crown of 
England offered to Philip Augustus of France. Philip 
Augustus had the modesty to refuse the splendid bribe, 
and contented himself with aiding to weaken a throne 
he did not feel inclined to fill. It is characteristic of 
John, that in the agonies of his fear, and of his desire 
to gain support against his people, he hesitated between 
invoking the assistance of the Miramolin of Morocco 
and the Pope of Borne. As good Mussulman with the 
one as Christian with the other, he finally decided on 
Innocent, and signed a solemn declaration of submission, 
making public resignation of the crowns of England 
and Ireland " to the Apostles Peter and Paul, to Inno- 
cent and his legitimate successors •" and, aided by the 
blessings of these new masters, and by the enforced 
neutrality of France, he was enabled to defeat his in- 
dignant nobles, and force them for two years to wear 
the same chains of submission to Borne which weighed 
upon himself. But in 1215 the patience of noble and 
peasant, of bishop and priest, was utterly exhausted. 



308 THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 

John fled on the first outburst of the collected storm, 
inir and thought himself fortunate in stopping its 

A.D. 1215. to m ti 

violence by signing the Great Charter, the 
written ratification of the liberties which had been con- 
ferred by some of his predecessors, but whose chief 
authority was in the traditions and customs of the land. 
This was not an overthrow of an old constitution and 
the substitution of a new and different code, but merely 
a formal recognition of the great and fundamental 
principles on which, only government can be carried 
on, — security of person and property, and the just ad- 
ministration of equitable laws. All orders in the State 
were comprehended in this national agreement. The 
Church was delivered from the exactions of the king, 
and left to an undisturbed intercourse on spiritual 
matters with her spiritual head. She was to have per- 
fect freedom of election to vacant benefices, and the 
king's rapacity was guarded against by a clause re- 
ducing any fine he might impose on an ecclesiastic to an 
accordance with his professional income, and not with 
the extent of his lay possessions. The barons, of course, 
took equal care of their own interests as they had 
shown for those of the Church. They corrected many 
abuses from which they suffered, in respect to their feu- 
dal obligations. They regulated the fines and quit-rents 
on succession to their fiefs, the management of crown 
wards, and the marriage of heiresses and widows. They 
insisted also on the assemblage of a council of the great 
and lesser barons, to consult for the general weal, and 
put some check on the disposal of their lands by their 
tenants, in order to keep their vassals from impoverish- 
ment and their military organization unimpaired. But 
when church and aristocracy were thus protected from 
the tyranny of the king, were the interests of the great 
mass of the people neglected? This has sometimes 



MAGNA CHARTA. 309 

been urged against the legislators of Runnyniede, but 
very unjustly; for as much attention was paid to the 
liberties and immunities of the municipal corporations 
and of ordinary subjects as to those of the prelates and 
lords. Every person had the right to dispose of his 
property by will. No arbitrary tolls could be exacted 
of merchants. All men might enter or leave the king- 
dom without restraint. The courts of law were no 
longer to be stationary at Westminster, to which com- 
plainants from Northumberland or Cornwall never could 
make their way, but were to travel about, bringing jus- 
tice to every man's door. They were to be open to 
every one, and justice was to be neither " sold, refused, 
nor delayed." Circuits were to be held every year. No 
man was to be put on his trial from mere rumour, but 
on the evidence of lawful witnesses. 'No sentence conld 
be passed on a freeman except by his peers in jury as- 
sembled. No fine could be imposed so exorbitant as to 
ruin the culprit. But the bishops and clergy, the nobility 
and their vassals, the corporations and freemen, were 
not the main bodies of the State ; and the framers of 
Magna Charta have been blamed for neglecting the great 
majority of the population, which consisted of serfs or 
villeins. This accusation is, however, not true, even 
with respect to the words of the Charter; for it is ex- 
pressly provided that the carts and working-implements 
of that class of the people shall not be seizable in satis- 
faction of a fine ; and in its intention the accusation is 
more untenable still; for although the reformers of > 1215 
had no design of granting new privileges to any hitherto- 
unprivileged order and their work was limited to the 
legal re-establishment of privileges which John had at- 
tempted to overthrow, the large and liberal spirit of 
their declarations is shown by the notice they take of 
the hitherto-un considered classes. For the protection 



310 



THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 



accorded to their ploughs and carts, which are specifi- 
cally named in the Charter, ratified at once their right 
to hold property, — the first condition of personal free- 
dom and independence, — and, by an analogy of reason- 
ing, restrained their more immediate masters from 
tyranny and injustice. It could not be long before a 
man secured by the national voice in the possession of 
one species of property extended his rights over every 
thing else. If the law guaranteed him the plough he 
held, the cart he drove, the spade he plied, why not the 
house he occupied, the little field he cultivated '( And 
if the poorest freeman walked abroad in the pride of in- 
dependence, because the baron could no longer insult 
him, or the priest oppress him, or the king himself strip 
him of land and gear, how could he deny the same 
blessings to his neighbour, the rustic labourer, who was 
already master of cart and plough and was probably 
richer and better fed than himself? 

But a firmer barrier against the encroachments of 
kings and nobles than the written words of Magna 
Charta was still required, and people were not long in 
seeing how little to be trusted are legal forms when the 
contracting parties are disposed to evade their obliga- 
tions. John indeed attempted, in the very year that 
saw his signature to the Charter, to expunge his name 
from the obligatory deed by the plenary power of the 
Pope. Innocent had no scruple in giving permission to 
his English vassal to break the oath and swerve from 
his engagement. But the English spirit was not so 
broken as the king's, and the barons took the manage- 
ment of the country into their own hands. When the 
experience of a few years of Henry the Third had 
shown them that there was no improvement on the 
personal character of his predecessor, they took effectual 
measures for the protection of all classes of the people 



SAINT LOUIS. 311 

Henry began his inglorious reign in 1216, and ended it 
in 1272. In those fifty-six years great changes took 
place, but all in an upward direction, out of the dark- 
ness and unimpressionable stolidity of previous ages. 
The dawn of a more intellectual period seemed at hand, 
and already the ghosts of ignorance and oppression 
began to scent the morning air. In 1264 an example 
was set by England which it would have been well if all 
the other Western lands had followed, for by the insti- 
tution of a true House of Commons it laid the founda- 
tion for the only possible liberal and improvable govern- 
ment, — the only government which can derive its 
strength from the consent of the governed legitimately 
expressed, and vary in its action and spirit with the 
changes in the general mind. In cases of error or tem- 
porary delusion, there is always left the most admirable 
machinery for retracing its steps and rectifying what is 
wrong. In cases of universal approval and unanimous 
exertion, there is no power, however skilfully wielded 
by autocrats or despots, which can compare with the 
combined energy of a whole and undivided people. 

The contemporary of this Henry on the throne of 
a.d. 1226 France was the gentle and honest Louis the 
-1270. 2^inth. If those epithets do not sound so high 
as the usual phraseology applied to kings, we are to 
consider how rare are the examples either of honesty or 
gentleness among the rulers of that time, and how diffi- 
cult it was to possess or exercise those virtues. But 
this gentle and honest king, who was scarcely raised in 
rank when the Church had canonized him as a saint, 
achieved as great successes by the mere strength of his 
character as other monarchs had done by fire and sword. 
His love of justice enabled him to extend the royal 
power over his contending vassals, who chose him as 
umpire of their quarrels and continued to submit to him 



312 THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 

as their chief. He heard the complaints of the lower 
orders of his people in person, sitting, like the kings of 
the East, under the shade of a tree, and delivering 
judgment solely on the merits of the case. His un- 
doubted zeal on behalf of his religion permitted him, 
without the accusation of heresy, to put boundaries to 
the aggressions of the Church. He resisted its more 
violent claims, and gave liberty to ecclesiastics as well 
as laymen, who were equally interested in the curtail- 
ment of the Papal power. He granted a great number 
of municipal charters, and published certain Establish- 
ments, as they were called, which were improvements 
on the old customs of the realm and were in a great 
measure founded on the Roman law. The spirit of the 
time was popular progress; and both in France and 
England great advances were made; deliberative national 
assemblies took their rise, — in France, under the con- 
scientious monarch, with the full aid and influence of 
the royal authority, in England, under the feeble and 
selfish Henry, by the necessity of gaining the aid of the 
Commons against the Crown to the outraged and in- 
sulted nobility. In both nations these assemblies bore 
for a long time very distinguishable marks of their 
origin. The Parliaments of France, sprung from the 
royal will, were little else than the recorders of the decrees 
of the monarch ■ while the Parliaments of England, re- 
membering their popular origin, have always had a 
feeling of independence, and a tendency to make rather 
hard bargains with our kings. Even before this time 
the Great Council had occasionally opposed the exactions 
of the Crown ; but when the falsehood and avarice of 
Henry III. had excited the popular odium, the barons 
of 12G3, in noble emulation of their predecessors of 
1215, had risen in defence of the nation's liberties, and 
the last hand was put to the building up of our present 



PAPAL TRIUMPHS. 313 

constitution, by the summoning, "to consult on public 
affairs," of certain burgesses from the towns, in addition 
to the prelates, knights, and freeholders who had hitherto 
constituted the parliamentary body. But those barons 
and tenants-in-chief attended in their own right, and 
were altogether independent of the principle of election 
and representation. The summons issued by 
Simon de Montfort (son of the truculent hero 
of the Albigensian crusade, and brother-in-law of Henry) 
invested with new privileges the already-enfranchised 
boroughs. From this time the representatives of the 
Commons are always mentioned in the history of par- 
liaments j and although this proceeding of De Montfort 
was only intended to strengthen his hands against his 
enemies, and, after his temporary object was gained, 
was not designed to have any further effect on the con- 
stitutional progress of our country, still, the principle 
had been adopted, the example was set, and the right to 
be represented in Parliament became one of the most 
valued privileges of the enfranchised commons. 

It is observable that this increase of civil freedom in 
the various countries of Europe was almost in exact 
proportion to the diminution of ecclesiastical power. It 
is equally observable that the weakening of the priestly 
influence rapidly followed the infamous excesses into 
which its intolerance and pride had hurried the princes 
and other supporters of its claims. Never, indeed, had 
it appeared in so palmy and flourishing a state as in the 
course of this century; and yet the downward journey 
was begun. The devastation it carried into Languedoc, 
and the depopulation of all those sunny regions near the 
Mediterranean Sea — the crusades against the Saracens 
in Asia, to which it sent the strength of Europe, and 
against the Moors in Africa, to which it impelled the 
most obedient, and also, when his religious passions 

27 



314 THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 

were roused, the most relentless, of the Church's sons, no 
other than St. Louis — and the submission of the Patri- 
archates of Jerusalem and Alexandria to the Romish 
See — these and other victories of the Church were suc- 
ceeded, before the century closed, by a manifest though 
silent insurrection against its spiritual domination. 
There were many reasons for this. The inferior though 
still dignified clergy in the different nations were alien- 
ated by the excessive exactions of their foreign head. 
In France the submissive St. Louis was forced to be- 
come the guardian of the privileges and income of the 
Gallican Church. In England the number of Italian in- 
cumbents exceeded that of the English-born ; and in a 
few years the Pope managed to draw from the Church 
and State an amount equal to fifteen millions of our 
present coin. In Scotland, poorer and more proud, the 
king united himself to his clergy and nobles, and would 
not permit the Romish exactors to enter his dominions. 
The avarice and venality of Rome were repulsive equally 
to priest and layman. The strong support, also, which 
hitherto had arisen to the Holy See from the innumerable 
monks and friars, could no longer be furnished by the 
depressed and vitiated communities whom the coarsest 
of the common people despised for their sensuality 
and vice. In earlier times the worldly pretensions of 
the secular clergy were put to shame by the poverty 
and self-denial of the regular orders. Their ascetic re- 
tirement, and fastings, and scourgings, had recommended 
them to the peasantry round their monasteries, by the 
contrast their peaceful lives presented to the pomp and 
self-indulgence of bishops and priests. But now the 
character of the two classes was greatly changed. The 
parson of the parish, when he was not an Italian ab- 
sentee, was an English clergyman, whose interests and 
feelings were all in unison with those of his flock; the 



WEAKENING OF THE PRIESTLY INFLUENCE. 315 

monks were an army of mercenary marauders in the 
service of a foreign prince, advocating his most un- 
popular demands and living in the ostentatious dis- 
regard of all their vows. Even the lowest class of all, 
the thralls and villeins, were not so much as before in 
favour of their tonsured brothers, who had escaped the 
labours of the field by taking refuge in the abbey ; for 
Magna Charta had given the same protection against 
oppression to themselves, and the enfranchisement of 
the boroughs had put power into the hands of citizens 
and freemen, who would not be so apt to abuse it as the 
martial baron or mitred prelate had been. The same 
principles were at work in France ; and when the newly- 
established Franciscans and Dominicans were pointed to 
as restoring the purity and abnegation of the monks of 
old, the time for belief in those virtues being inherent, 
or even possible, in a cloister, was past, and little effect 
was produced in favour of Eome by the bloodthirsty 
brotherhood of the ferocious St. Dominic or the more 
amiable professions of the half-witted St. Francis of 
Assisi. The tide, indeed, had so completely turned after 

t/ the commencement of the reign of Edward the 
a.d. 1272. ° 

First, that the Churchmen, both in England and 
France, preferred being taxed by their own Sovereign 
to being subjected to the arbitrary exactions of the Pope. 
Edward gave them no exemption from the obligation to 
support the expenses of the State in common with all 
the other holders of property, and pressed, indeed, 
rather more heavily upon the prelates and rich clergy 
than on the rest of the contributors, as if to drive to a 
decision the question, to which of the potentates — the 
Pope or the sovereign — tribute was lawfully due. 
When this object was gained, a bull was let loose upon 
the sacrilegious monarch by Boniface the Eighth, which 
positively forbids any member of the priesthood to con- 



31G 



THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 



tribute to the national exchequer on any occasion or 
emergency whatever. Bat the king made very light of 
the papal authority when it stood between him and the 
revenues of his crown, and the national clergy sub- 
mitted to be taxed like other men. In France the same 
discussion led to the same result. The Gallican and 
English Churches asserted their liberties in a way which 
must have been peculiarly gratifying to the kings, — 
namely, by subsidies to the Crown, and disobedience to 
the fulminations of the Pope. 

But no surer proof of the increased wisdom of man- 
kind can be given than the termination of the Crusades. 
Perhaps, indeed, it was found that religious excitement 
could be combined with warlike distinction by assaults 
on the unbelieving or disobedient at home. There 
seemed little use in traversing the sea and toiling 
through the deserts of Syria, when the same heavenly 
rewards were held out for a campaign against the in- 
habitants of Languedoc and the valleys of the Alj)S. 
Clearer views also of the political effect of those distant 
expeditions in strengthening the hands of the Pope, 
who, as spiritual head of Christendom, was ex officio 
commander of the crusading armies, must no doubt 
have occurred to the various potentates who found 
themselves compelled to aid the very authority from 
whose arrogance they suffered so much. The exhaus- 
tion of riches and decrease of population were equally 
strong reasons for repose. But none of all these consi- 
derations had the least effect on the simple and credu- 
lous mind of Louis the Ninth. Eesisting as he did the 
interference of the Pope in his character of King of 
Prance, no one could yield more devoted submission to 
the commands of the Holy Father when uttered to him 
in his character of Christian knight. At an early age 
he vowed himself to the snored cause, and in the yviw 



END OF THE CRUSADES. 317 

1248 the seventh and last crusade to the Holy Land 
took its way from Aigues-Mortes and Marseilles, under 
the guidance of the youthful King and the Princes of 
France. Disastrous to a more pitiful degree than any 
of its predecessors, this expedition began its course in 
Egypt by the conquest of Lamietta, and from thence- 
forth sank from misery to misery, till the army, surprised 
by the inundations of the Nile, and hemmed in by the 
triumphant Mussulmans, surrendered its arms, and the 
nobility of France, with its king at its head, found itself 
the prisoner of Almohadam. An insurrection in a short 
time deprived their conqueror of life and crown, and a 
treaty for the payment of a great ransom set the cap- 
tives free. Ashamed, perhaps, to return to his own 
country, sighing for the crown of martyrdom, zealous at 
all events for the privileges of a pilgrim, Louis betook 
himself to Palestine, and, as he was bound by the con- 
vention not to attack Jerusalem, he wasted four years 
in uselessly rebuilding the fortifications of Ptolemais, 
and Sidon, and Jaffa, and only embarked on his home- 
ward voyage when the death of his' mother and the dis- 
content of his subjects necessitated his return. After an 
absence of six years, the enfeebled and exhausted king 

sat once more in the chair of judgment, and 
a.d. 1254 J to ; 

gained all hearts by his generosity and truth. 

Yet the old fire was not extinct. His oath was binding 
still, and in 1270, girt with many a baron bold, and ac- 
companied by his brother, Charles of Anjou, and the 
gay Prince Edward of England, he fixed the red cross 
upon his shoulder and led his army to the sea-shore. 
The ships were all ready, but the destination of the war 
was changed. A new power had established itself at 
Tunis, more hostile to Christianity than the Moslem of 
Egypt, and nearer at hand. In an evil hour the King 
was persuaded to attack the Tunisian Caliph. He 

27* 



3!8 THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 

landed at Carthage, and besieged the capital of the new 
dominion. But Tunis witnessed the death of its besieger, 
for Louis, worn out with fatigue and broken with dis- 
appointment, was stricken by a contagious malady, and 
expired with the courage of a hero and the pious resig- 
nation of a Christian. With him the crusading spirit 
vanished from every heart. All the Christian armies 
were withdrawn. The Knights-Hospitallers, the Tem- 
plars, the Teutonic Order, passed over to Cyprus, and 
left the hallowed spots of sacred story to be profaned 
by the footsteps of the Infidel. Asia and Europe hence- 
forth pursued their separate courses ; and it was left to 
the present day to startle the nations of both quarters 
of the world with the spectacle of a war about the pos- 
session of the Holy Places. 

The century which has the slaughter of the Albi- 
genses, the Magna Charta, the rise of the Commons, the 
termination of the Crusades, to distinguish it, will not 
need other features to be pointed out in order to abide 
in our memories. Yet the reign of Edward the First, 
the greatest of our early kings, must be dwelt on a little 
longer, as it would not be fair to omit the personal merits 
of a man who united the virtues of a legislator to those 
of a warrior. Whether it was the prompting of ambi- 
tion, or a far-sighted policy, which led him to attempt 
the conquest of Scotland, we need not stop to inquire. 
It might have satisfied the longings both of policy and 
ambition if he had succeeded in creating a compact and 
irresistible Great Britain out of England harassed and 
Scotland insecure. And if, contented with his undi- 
vided kingdom, he had devoted himself uninterruptedly 
to the introduction and consolidation of excellent laws, 
and had extended the ameliorations he introduced in 
England to the northern portion of his dominions, he 
would have earned a wider fame than the sword has 



JOHN BALIOL. 319 

given him, and would have tteen received with blessings 
as the Justinian of the whole island, instead of esta- 
blishing a rankling hatred in the bosoms of one of the 
cognate peoples which it took many centuries to allay, 
if, indeed, it is altogether obliterated at the present 
time ; for there are not wanting enthusiastic Scotchmen 
who show considerable wrath when treating of his as- 
sumptions of superiority over their country and his in- 
terference with their national affairs. 

Edward's sister had been the wife of Alexander the 
Third of Scotland. Two sons of that marriage had 
died, and the only other child, a daughter, had married 
Eric the Norwegian. In Margaret, the daughter of 
this king, the Scottish succession lay, and when her 
grandfather died in 1290, the Scottish states sent a 
squadron to bring the young queen home, and great 
preparations were made for the reception of the "Maid 
of Norway ." But the Maid of Norway was weak in 
health; the voyage was tempestuous and long; and 
weary and exhausted she landed on one of the Orkney 
Islands, and in a short time a rumour went round the 
land that the hope of Scotland was dead. Edward was 
among the first to learn the melancholy news. He de- 
termined to assert his rights, and began by trying to 
extend the feudal homage which several of the Scottish 
kings had rendered for lands held in England, over the 
Scottish crown itself. When the various competitors 
for the vacant throne submitted their pretensions to his 
decision he made their acknowledgment of his supre- 
macy an indispensable condition. Out of the three chief 
candidates he fixed on John Baliol, who, in addition to 
the most legal title, had perhaps the equal recommenda- 
tion of being the feeblest personal character. Eobert 
Bruce and Hastings, the other candidates, submitted to 
their disappointment, and Baliol became the mere vice- 



320 THIRTEENTH CENTURY. 

roy of the English king. He obeyed a summons to West- 
minster as a vassal of Edward, to answer for his conduct, 
lSA , and was treated with disdain. But the Scottish 

A.D. 1293. 

barons had more spirit than their king. They 
forced him to resist the pretensions of his overbearing 
patron, and for the first time, in 1295, began the long 
connection between Franch and Scotland by a treaty 
concluded between the French monarch and the twelve 
Guardians of Scotland, to whom Baliol had delegated 
his authority before retiring forever to more peaceful 
scenes. From this time we find that, whenever war was 
declared by France on England, Scotland was let loose 
on it to distract its attention, in the same way as, when- 
ever war was declared upon France, the hostility of 
Flanders was roused against its neighbour. But the 
benefits bestowed by England on her Low Country ally 
were far greater than any advantage which France 
could offer to Scotland. Facilities of trade and favour- 
able tariffs bound the men of Ghent and Bruges to the 
interests of Edward. But the friendship of France was 
limited to a few bribes and the loan of a few soldiers. 
Scotland, therefore, became impoverished by her alliance, 
while Flanders grew fat on the liberality of her power- 
ful friend. England itself derived no small benefit both 
from the hostility of Scotland and the alliance of the 
Flemings. When the North ern army was strong, and 
the King was hard pressed by the great Wallace, the 
sagacious Parliament exacted concessions and immuni- 
ties from its imperious lord before it came liberally to 
his aid ; and whenever we read in one page of a check 
to the arms of Edward, we read in the next of an en- 
largement of the popular rights. When the first glow 
of the apparent conquest of Scotland was past, and the 
nation was seen rising under the Knight of Elderslie 
after it had been deserted by its natural leaders, the 



KINGLY CONCESSIONS TO PARLIAMENT. 321 

lords and barons, — and, later, when in 1297 he gained 
a great victory over the English at Stirling, — the 
English Parliament lost no time in availing themselves 
of the defeat, and sent over to the king, who was at the 
moment in Flanders menacing the flanks of France, a 
parchment for his signature, containing the most ample 
ratification of their power of granting or withholding 
the supplies. It was on the 10th of October, 1297, that 
this important document was signed ; and, satisfied with 
this assurance of their privileges, the "nobles, knights 
of the shire, and burgesses of England in parliament as- 
sembled" voted the necessary funds to enable their sove- 
reign lord to punish his rebels in Scotland. Perhaps 
these contests between the sister countries deepened the 
patriotic feeling of each, and prepared them, at a later 
day, to throw their separate and even hostile triumphs 
into the united stock, so that, as Charles Knight says 
in his admirable " Popular History," " the Englishman 
who now reads of the deeds of Wallace and Bruce, or 
hears the stirring words of one of the noblest lyrics of 
any tongue, feels that the call to 'lay the proud usurper 
low' is one which stirs his blood as much as that of the 
born Scotsman ; for the small distinctions of locality 
have vanished, and the great universal sympathies for 
the brave and the oppressed stay not to ask whether 
the battle for freedom was fought on the banks of the 
Thames or of the Forth. The mightiest schemes of 
despotism speedily perish. The union of nations is ac- 
complished only by a slow but secure establishment of 
mutual interests and equal rights." 



FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 



ISmperors of (germang, SBmperots of tjje 3East. 

A.D. A.D. 

Albert. — (con6.) Andronicus II. — (cont.) 

1308. Henry VII., (of Luxem- 1332. Andronicus III. 

burg.) 1341. John Pal^eologus. 

1314. Louis IV., (of \ 1347. John Cantacuzenus. 

Bavaria.) / Eival 1355. John Pal^ologus, (re- 

1314. Frederick III.,) Empe- stored.) 

(of Austria,) \ rors. 1391. Manuel Pal^eologus. 
died 1330. ' 

1347. Charles IV., (of Luxem- 
burg.) l&tngs of SSncjlarrtr. 

1378. Wenceslas, (of Bohe- Edward L— (cont) 

mia 1307. Edward II. 

Ittngs of dftance. 1327 - Edward hi. 

Philip IV.-(conL) 1377 ' ElCHARD IL 

1314. Louis X., (Hutin.) 1399 ' Henry IV ' 
1316. Philip V., (the Long.) 
1322. Charles IV., (the Hand- mn ^ ^ g (oiim ^ 

some.) 

1328. Philip VI. 1306. Robert Bruce. 

1350. John II., (the Good.) 1329 - Da ™ n - 

1364. Charles V., (the Wise.) 137L Robert II. 

1380. Charles VL, (the Be- 139 °- Robert HI. 

loved.) 

1311. Suppression of the Knights Templars. 

1343. Cannon first used. 

1370. John Huss born. 

1383. Bible first translated into a vulgar tongue, ( WicklifFs.) 

Etttfjors. 

Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Froissart, John Duns 
Scotus, Bradwardine, William Occam, Wickliff. 



THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 

ABOLITION OF THE ORDER OF THE TEMPLARS RISE OP 

MODERN LITERATURES — SCHISM OP THE CHURCH. 

In the year 1300 a jubilee was celebrated at Rome, 
when remission of sins and other spiritual indulgences 
were offered to all visitors by the liberal hand of Pope 
Boniface the Eighth. And for the thirty days of the 
solemn ceremonial, the crowds who poured in from all 
parts of Europe, and pursued their way from church to 
church and kissed with reverential lips the relics of the 
saints and martyrs, gave an appearance of strength and 
universality to the Roman Church which had long de- 
parted from it. Yet the downward course had been so 
slow, and each defection or defeat had been so covered 
from observation in a cloud of magnificent boasts, that 
the real weakness of the Papacy was only known 
to the wise and politic. Even in the splendours and 
apparent triumph of the jubilee processions it was per- 
ceived by the eyes of hostile statesmen that the day of 
faith was past. 

Dante, the great poet of Italy, was there, piercing 
with his Ithuriel spear the false forms under which the 
spiritual tyranny concealed itself. Countless multitudes 
deployed before him without blinding him for a moment 
to the unreality of all he saw. Others were there, not 
deriving their conclusions, like Dante, from the intuitive 
insight into truth with which the highest imaginations 
are gifted, but from the calmer premises of reason and 
observation. Even while the paeans were loudest and 

28 325 



326 FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 

the triumph at its height, thoughts were entering into 
many hearts which had never been harboured before, 
but which in no long space bore their fruits, not only in 
opposition to the actual proceedings of Kome, but in 
undisguised contempt and ridicule of all its claims. 
Boniface himself, however, was ignorant of all these 
secret feelings. He was now past eighty years of age, 
and burning with a wilder personal ambition and more 
presumptuous ostentation than would have been pardon- 
able at twenty. He appeared in the processions of the 
jubilee, dressed in the robes of the Empire, with two 
swords, and the globe of sovereignty carried before him. 
A herald cried, at the same time, "Peter, behold thy 
successor ! Christ, behold thy vicar upon earth !" But 
the high looks of the proud were soon to be brought 
low. The King of France at that time was Philip the 
Handsome, the most unprincipled and obstinate of men, 
who stuck at no baseness or atrocity to gain his ends, — 
who debased the Crown, pillaged the Church, oppressed 
the people, tortured the Jews, and impoverished the no- 
bility, — a self-willed, strong-handed, evil-hearted despot, 
and glowing with an intense desire to humble and spoil 
the Holy Father himself. If he could get the Pope to be 
his tax-gatherer, and, instead of emptying the land of 
all its wealth for the benefit of the Eoman exchequer, 
pour Boman, German, English, European contributions 
into his private treasury, the object of his life would be 
gained. His coffers would be overflowing, and his prin- 
cipal opponent disgraced. A wonderful and apparently 
impossible scheme, but which nevertheless succeeded. 
The combatants at first seemed very equally matched. 
When Boniface made an extravagant demand, Philip 
sent him a contemptuous reply. When Boniface turned 
for alliances to the Emperor or to England, Philip threw 
himself on the sympathy of his lords and the inhabit- 



BONIFACE. 327 

ants of the towns; for the parts formerly played by 
Pope and King were now reversed. The Papacy, instead 
of recurring to the people and strengthening itself by 
contact with the masses who had looked to the Church 
as their natural guard from the aggressions of their 
lords, now had recourse to the more dangerous expedient 
of exciting one sovereign against another, and weak- 
ened its power as much by concessions to its friends as 
by the hostility of its foes. The king, on the other hand, 
flung himself on the support of his subjects, including 
both the Church and Parliament, and thus raised a feel- 
ing of national independence which was more fatal to 
Eoman preponderance than the most active personal 
enmity could have been. Accordingly, we find Boniface 
offending the population of France by his intemperate 
attacks on the worst of kings, and that worst of kings 
attracting the admiration of his people by standing up 
for the dignity of the Crown against the presumption 
of the Pope. The fact of this national spirit is shown 
by the very curious circumstance that while Philip and 
his advisers, in their quarrels with Boniface, kept within 
the bounds of respectful language in the letters they 
actually sent to Rome, other answers were disseminated 
among the people as having been forwarded to the 
Pope, outraging all the feelings of courtesy and respect. 
It was like the conduct of the Chinese mandarins, who 
publish vainglorious and triumphant bulletins among 
their people, while they write in very different language 
to the enemy at their gates. Thus, in reply to a very 
insulting brief of Boniface, beginning, "Ausculta, fili," 
(Listen, son,) and containing a catalogue of all his com- 
plaints against the French king, Philip published a 
version of it, omitting all the verbiage in which the 
insolent meaning was involved, and accompanied it in 
the same way with a copy of the unadorned eloquence 



328 FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 

which constituted his reply. In this he descended to 
very plain speaking. " Philip/' he says, " by the grace 
of God, King of the French, to Boniface, calling himself 
Pope, little or no salutation. Be it known to your 
Fatuity that we are subject in temporals to no man 
alive; that the collation of churches and vacant pre- 
bends is inherent in our Crown ; that their < fruits' be- 
long to us j that all presentations made or to be made 
by us are valid ; that we will maintain our presentees in 
possession of them with all our power; and that we 
hold for fools and idiots whosoever believes otherwise." 
This strange address received the support of the great 
majority of the nation, and was meant as a translation 
into the vulgar tongue of the real intentions of the irri- 
tated monarch, which were concealed in the letter really 
despatched in a mist of polite circumlocutions. Boni- 
face perceived the animus of his foe, but bore himself as 
loftily as ever. When a meeting of the barons, held in 
the Louvre, had appealed to a General Council and had 
passed a vote of condemnation against the Pope as 
guilty of many crimes, not exclusive of heresy itself, 
he answered, haughtily, that the summoning of a council 
was a prerogative of the Pope, arid that already the 
King had incurred the danger of excommunication for 
the steps he had taken against the Holy Chair. To 
prevent the publication of the sentence, which might 
have been made a powerful weapon against France in 
the hands of Albert of Germany or Edward of England, 
it was necessary to give notice of an appeal to a 
General Council into the hands of the Pope in person. 
He had retired to Anagni, his native town, where he 
found himself more secure among his friends and rela- 
tions than in the capital of his See. Colonna, a discon- 
tented Eoman and sworn enemy of Boniface, and 
Supino, a military adventurer, whom Philip bought 



ARREST OF THE POPE. 329 

over with a bribe of ten thousand florins, introduced 
ISTogaret, the French chancellor and cnief adviser of the 
king, into Anagni, with cries from their armed attend- 
ants of " Death to the Pope \" " Long live the King 
of France !" The cardinals fled in dismay. The inhabit- 
ants, not being able to prevent their visitors from pil- 
laging the shops, joined them in that occupation, and 
every thing was in confusion. The Pope was in despair. 
His own nephew had abandoned his cause and made 
terms for himself. Accounts vary as to his behaviour 
in these extremities. Perhaps they are all true at dif- 
ferent periods of the scene. At first, overwhelmed with 
the treachery of his friends, he is said to have burst 
into tears. Then he gathered his ancient courage, and, 
when commanded to abdicate, offered his neck to the 
assailants ; and at last, to strike them with awe, or at 
least to die with dignity, he bore on his shoulders the 
mantle of St. Peter, placed the crown of Constantine on 
his head, and grasped the keys and cross in his hands. 
Colonna, they say, struck him on the cheek with his 
iron gauntlet till the blood came. Let us hope that this 
is an invention of the enemy ; for the Pope was eighty- 
six years old, and Colonna was a Roman soldier. There 
is always a tendency to elevate the sufferer in the cause 
we favour, by the introduction of ennobling circum- 
stances. In this and other instances of the same kind 
there is the further temptation in orthodox historians to 
make the most they can of the martyrdom of one of 
their chiefs, and in a peculiar manner to glorify the 
wrongs of their hero by their resemblance to the suf- 
ferings of Christ. But the rest of the story is melan- 
choly enough without the aggravation of personal pain. 
The pontiff abstained from food for three whole days. 
He consumed his grief in secret, and was only relieved 
at last from fears of the dagger or poison by an insur- 

2$* 



330 FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 

rection of the people. They fell upon the French escort 
when they perceived how weak it was, and carried the 
Pope into the market-place. He said, " Good people, 
you have seen how our enemies have spoiled me of my 
goods. Behold me as poor as Job. I tell you truly, I have 
nothing to eat or drink. If there is any good woman 
who will charitably bestow on me a little bread and 
wine, or even a little water, I will give her God's bless- 
ing and mine. Whoever will bring me the smallest 
thing in this my necessity, I will give him remission of 
all his sins." All the people cried, " Long live the Holy 
Father V They ran and brought him bread and wine, 
and any thing they had. Everybody would enter and 
speak to him, just as to any other of the poor. In a 
short time after this he proceeded to Borne, and felt 
once more in safety. But his heart was tortured by 
anger and a thirst for vengeance. He became insane; 
and when he tried to escape from the restraints his state 
demanded, and found his way barred by the Orsini, his 
insanity became madness. He foamed at the mouth and 
ground his teeth when he was spoken to. He repelled 
the offers of his friends with curses and violence, and 
died without the sacraments or consolations of the 
Church. The people remembered the prophecy 
made of him by his predecessor Celestin : — "You 
mounted like a fox ; you will reign like a lion ; you will 
die like a dog." 

But the degradation of the papal chair was not yet 
complete, and Philip was far from satisfied. Merely to 
have harassed to death an old man of eighty-six was not 
sufficient for a monarch who wanted a servant in the 
Pope more than a victim. To try his power over Bene- 
dict the Eleventh, the successor of Boniface, he began a 
process in the Roman court against the memory of his 
late antagonist. Benedict replied by an anathema in 



PHILIP'S BARGAIN. 331 

general terms on the murderers of Boniface, and all 
Philip's crimes and schemings seemed of no avail. But 
one day the sister of a religious order presented His 
Holiness with a basket of figs, and in a short time the 
pontifical throne was vacant. 

Now was the time for the triumph of the king. He 
had devoted much time and money to win over a num- 
ber of cardinals to his cause, and obtained a promise 
under their hands and seals that they would vote for 
whatever candidate he chose to name. He was not long 
in fixing on a certain Bernard de Goth, Archbishop of 
Bordeaux, the most greedy and unprincipled of the pre- 
lates of France, and appointed a meeting with him to 
settle the terms of a bargain. They met in a forest 
they heard mass together, and took mutual oaths of se- 
crecy, and then the business began. " See, archbishop," 
said the king : " I have it in my power to make you 
Pope if I choose; and if you promise me six favours 
which I will ask of you, I will assure you that dignity, 
and give you evidence of the truth of what I say." So 
saying, he showed the letters and delegation of both the 
electoral colleges. The archbishop, filled with covetous- 
ness, and seeing at once how entirely the popedom de- 
pended on the king, threw himself trembling with joy 
at Philip's feet. " My lord," he said, " I now perceive 
you love me more than any man alive, and that you 
render me good for evil. It is for you to command, — 
for me to obey; and I shall always be ready to do so." 
The king lifted him up, kissed him on the mouth, and 
said to him, "The six special favours I have to ask of 
you are these. First, that you will reconcile me entirely 
with the Church, and get me pardoned for my misdeed 
in arresting Pope Boniface. Second, that you will give 
the communion to me and all my supporters. Thi:*d, 
that you will give me tithes of the clergy of my realm 



332 



FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 



for five years, to supply the expenses of the war in 

Flanders. Fourth, that you will destroy and annul the 

memory of Boniface the Eighth. Fifth, that you will 

give the dignity of Cardinal to Messer Jacopo, and 

Messer Piero de la Colonna, along with certain others 

of my friends. As for the sixth favour and promise, I 

reserve it for the proper time and place, for it is a great 

and secret thing." The archbishop promised all by oath 

on the Corpus Domini, and gave his brother and two 

nephews as hostages. The king, on the other hand, 

made oath to have him elected Pope. 

His Holiness Clement the Fifth was therefore the 

, OAr thrall and servant of Philip le Bel. ]STo office 
a.b. 1305. x 

was too lowly, or sacrifice too large, for the 
grateful pontiff. He carried his subserviency so far as 
to cross the Alps and receive the wages of his obedience, 
the papal tiara, at Lyons. He became in fact a citizen 
of France, and subject of the crown. He delivered over 
the clergy to the relentless hands of the king. He gave 
him tithes of all their livings ; and as the Count of 
Flanders owed money to Philip which he had no 
means of paying, the generosity of the Pope came to 
the rescue, and he gave the tithes of the Flemish clergy 
to the bankrupt count in order to enable him to pay his 
debt to the exacting monarch. But the gift of these 
taxes was not a transfer from the Pope to the king or 
count : His Holiness did not reduce his own demands in 
consideration of the subsidies given to those powers. 
He completed, indeed, the ruin the royal tax-gatherers 
began ; for he travelled in more than imperial state from 
end to end of France, and ate bishop and abbot, and 
prior and prebendary, out of house and home. Wher- 
ever he rested for a night or two, the land became im- 
poverished ; and all this wealth was poured into the lap 
of a certain Bmnissende de Perigord, who cost the 



EXTINCTION OF KNIGHTHOOD. 333 

Church, it was popularly said, more than the Holy 
Land. But the capacity of Christian contribution was 
soon exhausted; and yet the interminable avarice of 
Pope and King went on. The honourable pair hit upon 
an excellent expedient, and the Jews were offered as a 
fresh pasture for the unimpaired appetite of the Father 
of Christendom and the eldest son of the Church. 
Philip hated their religion, but seems to have had a 
great respect for the accuracy of their proceedings in 
trade. So, to gratify the first, he stripped them of all 
they had, and, to prove the second, confiscated the money 
he found entered in their books as lent on interest to 
Christians. He was found to be a far more difficult 
creditor to deal with than the original lenders had been, 
and many a baron and needy knight had to refund to 
Philip the sums, with interest at twenty per cent., 
which they might have held indefinitely from the sons 
of Abraham and repudiated in an access of religious 
fervour at last. 

But worse calamities were hanging over the heads of 
knights and barons than the avarice of Philip and the 
dishonesty of Clement. Knighthood itself, and feudal- 
ism, were about to die, — knighthood, which had offered 
at all events an ideal of nobleness and virtue, and feudal- 
ism, which had replaced the expiring civilization of 
Eome founded on the centralization of power in one 
man's hands, and the degradation of all the rest, with a 
new form of society which derived its vitality from in- 
dependent action and individual self-respect. It was by 
a still wider expansion of power and influence that feu- 
dalism was to be superseded. Other elements besides 
the possession of land were to come into the constitu- 
tion of the new state of human affairs. The man hence- 
forth was not to be the mere representative of so many 
acres of ground. His individuality was to be still 



334 FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 

further defined, and learning, wealth, knowledge, arts, 
and sciences were from this time forth to have as much 
weight in the commonwealth as the hoisted pennon and 
strong-armed followers of the steel-clad warrior. 

" The old order changeth, giving place to new, 
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." 

We have already seen the prosperity of the towns, 
and have even heard the contemptuous laughter with 
which the high-fed burghers of G-hent or Bruges received 
the caracollings of their ponderous suzerain as, armed 
cap-d-pied, he rode up to their impregnable walls. Not 
less barricaded than the contemptuous city behind the 
steel fortifications with which he protected his person, 
the knight had nothing to fear so long as he bestrode 
his war-horse and managed to get breath enough 
through the openings of his cross-barred visor. He 
was as safe in his iron coating as a turtle in its shell ; 
but he was nearly as unwieldy as he was safe. When 
galloping forward against a line of infantry, nothing 
could resist his weight. With heavy mace or sweeping 
sword he cleared his ground on either side, and the un- 
armoured adversary had no means of repelling his 
assault. A hundred knights, therefore, we may readily 
believe, very often have put their thousands or tens 
of thousands to flight. We read, indeed, of immense 
slaughters of the common people, accompanied with the 
loss of one single knight ; and this must be attributed to 
the perfection which the armourer's art had attained, by 
which no opening for arrow or spear-point was left in 
the whole suit. But military instruments had for some 
time been invented, which, by projecting large stones 
with enormous force, flattened the solid cuirass or 
crushed the glittering helm. Once get the stunned or 
wounded warrior on the ground, there was no further 
danger to be apprehended. He lay in his iron prison 



COURTEAI. 335 

unable to get up, unable to breathe, and with the ad- 
ditional misfortune of being so admirably protected that 
his enemies had difficulty in putting him out of his pain. 
This, however, was counterbalanced by the ample time 
he possessed, during their futile efforts to reach a vital 
part, to bargain for his life; and this was another 
element in the safety of knightly war. A ransom 
could at all times preserve his throat, whereas the dis- 
abled foot-soldier was pierced with relentless point or 
trodden down by the infuriated horse. The knight's 
position, therefore, was more like that of a fighter 
behind walls, only that he carried his wall with him 
wherever he went, and even when a breach was made 
could stop up the gap with a sum of money. Nobody 
had ever believed it possible for footmen to stand up 
against a charge of cavalry. No manoeuvres were 
learned like the hollow squares of modern times, which, 
at Waterloo and elsewhere, have stood unmoved against 
the best swordsmen of the world. But once, at the 
beginning of this century, in 1302, a dreadful event 
happened, which gave a different view of the capabili- 
ties of determined infantry in making head against 
their assailants, and commenced the lesson of the re- 
sistibility of mounted warriors which was completed 
by Bannockburn in Scotland, and Crecy and Poictiers. 

The dreadful event was the entire overthrow of the 
knights and gentlemen of France by the citizens of a 
Flemish manufacturing town at the battle of Courtrai. 
Impetuous valour, and contempt for smiths and weavers, 
blinded the fiery nobles. They rushed forward with 
loose bridles, and, as they had disdained to reconnoitre 
the scene of the display, they fell headlong, one after 
another, horse and plume, sword and spur, into one 
enormous ditch which lay between them and their 
enemies. On they came, an avalanche of steel and 



336 FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 

horseflesh, and floundered into the muddy hole. Hun- 
dreds, thousands, unable to check their steeds, or afraid 
to appear irresolute, or goggling in vain through the 
deep holes left for their eyes, fell, struggled, writhed, 
and choked, till the ditch was filled with trampled 
knights and tumbling horses, and the burghers on the 
opposite bank beat in the helmets of those who tried to 
climb up, with jagged clubs, and hacked their naked 
heads. And when the whole army was annihilated, and 
the spoils were gathered, it was found there were princes 
and lords in almost incredible numbers, and four thou- 
sand golden spurs to mark the extent of the knightly 
slaughter and give name to the engagement. It is 
called the Battle of the Spurs,— for a nobler cause than 
another engagement of the same name, which we shall 
meet with in a future century, and which derived its 
appellation from the fact that spurs were more in re- 
quisition than swords. 

Philip was at this moment in the middle of his quarrel 
with Boniface. He determined to compensate himself 
for the loss he had sustained in military fame at Cour- 
trai by fiercer exactions on his clergy and bitterer 
enmity to the Pope. We have seen how he pursued 
the wretched Boniface to the grave, and persisted in 
trying to force the obsequious Clement to blacken his 
memory after he was dead. Clement was unwilling to 
expose the vices and crimes of his predecessor, and yet 
he had given a promise in that strange meeting in the 
forest to work his master's will; he was also resident in 
France, and knew how unscrupulous his protector was. 
Philip availed himself of the discredit brought on 
knighthood by the loss of all those golden spurs, and 
compounded for leaving the deceased pontiff alone, by 
exacting the consent of Clement to his assault on the 
order of the Templars, the wealthiest institution in the 



THE TEMPLARS. 337 

world, who held thousands of the best manors in France, 
and whose spoils would make him the richest king in 
Christendom. Yet the Templars were no contemptible 
foes. In number they were but fourteen thousand, but 
their castles were over all the land; they were every 
one of them of noble blood, and strong in the relation- 
ship of all the great houses in Europe. If they had 
united with their brethren, the Knights Hospitallers, no 
sovereign could have resisted their demands ; but, for- 
tunately for Philip, they were rivals to the death, and 
gave no assistance to each other when oppressed. Both, 
in fact, had outlived the causes of their institution, and 
had forfeited the respect of the masses of the people by 
their ostentatious abnegation of all the rules by which 
they professed to be bound. Poverty, chastity, and 
brotherly kindness were the sworn duties of the most 
rich, sensual, and unpitying society which ever lived. 
When Richard of England was dying, he made an 
imaginary will, and said, "I leave my avarice to the 
Citeaux, my luxury to the Grey Friars, and my pride to 
the Templars." And the Templars took possession of 
the bequest. When driven from the Holy Land, they 
settled in all the Christian kingdoms from Denmark to 
the south of Italy, and everywhere presented the same 
spectacle of selfishness and debauchery. In Paris they 
had got possession of a tract of ground equal to one- 
third of the whole city, and had covered it with towers 
and battlements, and within the unapproachable fortress 
lived a life of the most luxurious self-indulgence. Strange 
rumours got abroad of the unholy rites with which their 
initiations were accompanied. Their receptions into the 
order were so mysterious and sacred that an interloper 
(if it had been the King of France) would have been put 
to death for his intrusion. Frightful stories were told 
of their blasphemies and hideous ceremonials. Reports 
W 29 



338 



FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 



came even from over the sea, that while in Jerusalem 
they had conformed to the Mohammedan faith and had 
exchanged visits and friendly offices with the chiefs of 
the unbelievers. Against so dark and haughty an asso- 
ciation it was easy to stir up the popular dislike. No- 
body could take their part, they lived so entirely to 
themselves and shunned sympathy and society with so 
cold a disdain. They were men of religious vows with- 
out the humility of that condition, so they were hated 
by the nobles, who looked on priests as their natural in- 
feriors; they were nobles without the individual riches 
of the barons and counts, and they were hated by the 
priests, who were at all times the foes of the aristocracy. 
Hated, therefore, by priest and noble, their policy would 
have been to make friends of the lower orders, rising 
citizens, and the great masses of the people. But they 
saw no necessity for altering their lofty course. They 
bore right onward in their haughty disregard of all the 
rest of the world, and were condemned by the universal 
feeling before any definite accusation was raised against 
them. 

Clement yielded a faint consent to the proceedings of 
Philip, and that honourable champion of the faith gave 
full loose to his covetousness and hatred. First of all he 
prayed meekly for admission as a brother of the order. 
He would wear the red cross upon his shoulder and 
obey their godly laws. If he had obtained his object, 
he would have procured the grand-mastership for him- 
self and disposed of their wealth at his own discretion. 
The order might have survived, but their possessions 
would have been Philip's. They perhaps perceived his 
aim, and declined to admit him into their ranks. A re- 
jected candidate soon changes his opinion of the former 
object of his ambition. He now reversed his plan, and 
declared they were unworthy, not only to wallow in the 



ACCUSATIONS AGAINST THE TEMPLARS. 339 

wealth and splendour of their commanderies, but to live 
in a Christian land. He said they were guilty of all the 
crimes and enormities by which human nature was ever 
disgraced. James de Molay, the grand-master, and all 
the knights of the order throughout France, were seized 
and thrown into prison. Letters were written to all 
other kings and princes, inciting them to similar con- 
duct, and denouncing the doomed fraternity in the 
harshest terms. The promise of the spoil was tempting 
to the European sovereigns, but all of them resisted the 
inducement, or at least took gentler methods of attaining 
the same end. But Philip was as much pleased with 
the pursuit as with the catching of the game. He sum- 
moned a council of the realm, and obtained at the same 
time a commission of inquiry from the Pope. With 
these two courts to back him, it was impossible to fail. 
The knights were kept in noisome dungeons. They 
were scantily fed, and tormented with alternate pro- 
mises and threats. When physically weak and mentally 
depressed, they were tortured in their secret cells, and 
under the pressure of fear and desperation confessed to 
whatever was laid to their charge. Relieved from their 
torments for a moment, they retracted their confessions; 
but the written words remained. And in one day, before 
the public had been prepared for such extremity 
of wrong, fifty-four of these Christian soldiers — 
now old, and fallen from their high estate — were pub- 
licly burned in the place of execution, and no further 
limit was placed to the rapacity of the king. Still the 
odious process crept on with the appearance of law, for 
already the forms of perverted justice were found safer 
and more certain than either sword or fagot; and at 
last, in 1314, the ruined brotherhood were allowed to 
join themselves to other fraternities. The name of 
Templar was blotted out from the knightly roll-call of 



340 FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 

all Europe ; and in every nation, in England and Scot- 
land particularly, the order was despoiled of all its pos- 
sessions. Clement, however, was furious at seeing the 
moderation of rulers like Edward II., who merely 
stripped the Templars of their houses and lands, and 
did not dabble, as his patron Philip had done, in their 
blood, and rebuked them in angry missives for their 
coldness in the cause of religion. 

JSTow, early in this century, a Pope had been per- 
sonally ill used, and his successor had become the pen- 
sioner and prisoner of one of the basest of kings; a 
glorious brotherhood of Christian knights had been 
shamelessly and bloodily destroyed. Was there no out- 
cry from outraged piety ? — no burst of indignation against 
the perpetrator of so foul a wrong? Pity was at last 
excited by the sufferings and humiliations of the brothers 
of the Temple ; but pity is not a feeling on which knight- 
hood can depend for vitality or strength. Perhaps, 
indeed, the sympathy raised for the sad ending of that 
once-dreaded institution was more fatal to its revival, 
and more injurious to the credit of all surviving chivalry, 
than the greatest amount of odium would have been. 
Speculative discussions were held about the guilt or in- 
nocence of the Templars, but the worst of their crimes 
was the crime of being weak. If they had continued 
united and strong, nobody would have heard of the ex- 
cesses laid to their charge. Passing over the impossible 
accusations brought against them by ignorance and 
hatred, the offence they were charged with which 
raised the greatest indignation, and was least capable 
of disproof, was that in their reception into the order 
they spat upon the crucifix and trampled on the sign 
of our salvation. Nothing can be plainer than that tl is, 
at the first formation of the order, had been a symbol, 
which in the course of years had lost its significance. 



CHANGES IN SOCIETY. 341 

At first introduced as an emblem of Peter's denial and 
of worldly disbelief, to be exchanged, when once they 
were clothed with the Crusader's mantle, for unflinching 
service and undoubting Faith, — a passage from death 
unto life, — it had been retained long after its intention 
had been forgotten j and nothing is so striking as the 
confession of some of the younger knights, of the re- 
luctance, the shame and trembling, with which, at the 
request of their superior, they had gone through the re- 
pulsive ceremony. This is one of the dangers of a sym- 
bolic service. The symbol supersedes the fact. The 
imitation of Peter becomes a falling away from Christ. 
But a century before this time, who can doubt that all 
Christendom would have rushed to the rescue of the 
Pope if he had been seized in his own city and mal- 
treated as Boniface had been, and that every gentleman 
in Europe would have drawn sword in behalf of the 
noble Templars? 

But papacy, feudalism, and knighthood, as they had 
risen and flourished together, were enveloped in the 
same fall. The society of the Dark Ages had been per- 
fect in its symmetry and compactness. Kings were but 
feudal leaders and chiefs in their own domains. Knight- 
hood was but the countenance which feudalism turned 
to its enemies, while hospitality, protection, and alliance 
were its offerings to its friends. Over all, representative 
of the heavenly power which cared for the helpless mul- 
titudes, the serfs and villeins, those who had no other 
friend, — the Church extended its sheltering arms to the 
lowest of the low. Feudalism could take care of itself; 
knighthood made itself feared ; but the multitudes could 
only listen and be obedient. All, therefore, who had no 
sword, and no broad acres, were natural subjects of the 
Pope. But with the rise of the masses the relations 
between them and the Church became changed. It was 

29* 



342 FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 

found that during the last two hundred years, since the 
awakening of mercantile enterprise by the Crusades 
and the commingling of the population in those wild and 
yet elevating expeditions, by the progress of the arts, 
by the privileges wrung from king and noble by flourish- 
ing towns or purchased from them with sterling coin, 
by the deterioration in the morals of priest and baron, 
and the rise in personal importance of burghers, who 
could fight like those of Courtrai or raise armies like 
those of Pisa and Genoa, — that the state of society had 
gradually been changed ; that the commons were well 
able to defend their own interest; that the feudal pro- 
prietor had lost his relative rank; that the knight was no 
longer irresistible as a warrior ; and that the Pope had 
become one of the most worldly and least scrupulous of 
rulers. Far from being the friend of the unprotected, 
the Church was the subject of all the ballads of every 
nation, wherein its exactions and debaucheries were 
sung at village fairs and conned over in chimney- 
corners. Cannon were first used in this century at the 
siege of Algesiras in 1343 ; and with the first discharge 
knighthood fell forever from the saddle. The Bible was 
first translated into a national tongue,* and Popery fell 
forever from its unopposed dominion. How, indeed, 
even without this incident, could the Papacy have re- 
tained its power ? From 1305 till 1376 the wearers of 
the tiara were the mere puppets of the Kings of France. 
They lived in a nominal freedom at Avignon, but the 
college of electors was in the pay of the French 
sovereign, and the Pope was the creature of his hands. 
This was fatal to the notion of his independence. But 
a heavier blow was struck at the unity of the papal 
power when a double election, in 1378, established two 

* WicklifFs English Bible, 1383. 



DECLINE OE THE PAPACY. 343 

supreme chiefs, one exacting the obedience of the faith- 
ful from his palace on the banks of the Ehone, and the 
other advancing the same claim from the banks of the 
Tiber. From this time the choice of the chief pontiff 
became a political struggle between the principal kings. 
There were French and German, and even English, 
parties in the conclave, and bribes were as freely ad- 
ministered as at a contested election or on a dubious 
question in the time of Sir Eobert Walpole. Family 
interest also, from this time, had more effect on the 
policy of the Popes than the ambition to extend their 
spiritual authority. They sacrificed some portion of 
their claims to insure the elevation of their relations. 
Alliances were made, not for the benefit of the Eoman 
chair, but for some kinsman's establishment in a prin- 
cipality. Dukedoms became appanages of the papal 
name, and every new Pope left the mark of his bene- 
ficence in the riches and influence of the favourite 
nephew whom he had invested with sovereign rank. 
Italy became filled with new dynasties created by these 
means, and the politics of the papal court became com- 
plicated by this diversity of motive and influence. Yet 
feudalism struggled on in spite of cannon and the rise 
of the middle orders ; and Popery struggled on in spite 
of the spread of information and the diffusion of wealth 
and freedom. For some time, indeed, the decline of 
both those institutions was hidden by a factitious bril- 
liancy reflected on them by other causes. The increase 
of refinement gave rise to feelings of romance, which 
were unknown in the days of darkness and suffering 
through which Europe had passed. A reverence for 
antiquity softened the harsher features by which they 
had been actually distinguished, and knighthood became 
subtilized into chivalry. As the hard and uninviting 
reality retreated into the past, the imagination clothed 



344 



FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 



it in enchanting hues; and at the very time when the 

bowmen and yeomanry of England had shown at Crecy 

how unfounded were the " boast of heraldry, the pomp 

of power," Edward III. had instituted the Order of the 

„ orrt Garter, — a transmutation as it were of the rude 
a.d. 1350. ' 

shocks of knighthood into carpet pacings in the 
gilded halls of a palace ; as in a former age the returned 
Crusaders had supplied the want of the pride and cir- 
cumstance of the real charge against the Saracen by in- 
troducing the bloodless imitation of it afforded by the 
tournament. In the same way the personal disqualifica- 
tion of the Pope was supplied by an elevation of the 
ideal of his place and office. Eeligion became poetry 
and sentiment ; and though henceforth the reigning pon- 
tiff was treated with the harshness and sometimes the 
contempt his personal character deserved, his throne 
was still acknowledged as the loftiest of earthly thrones. 
The plaything of the present was nevertheless an idol 
and representative of the past; and kings who drove 
him from his home, or locked him up in their prisons, 
pretended to tremble at his anger, and received his 
letters on their knees. 

It must have been evident to any far-seeing observer 
that some great change was in progress during the 
whole of this century, not so much from the results of 
Courtrai, or Crecy, or Poictiers, or the migration of the 
Pope to Avignon, or the increasing riches of the trading 
and manufacturing towns, as from the great uprising of 
the human mind which was shown by the almost simul- 
taneous appearance of such stars of literature as Dante, 
and Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and our English Chaucer. 
I suppose no single century since has been in possession 
of four such men. Great geniuses, indeed, and great 
discoveries, seem to come in crops, as if a certain period 
had been fixed for their bursting into flower; and we 



LITERARY DEVELOPMENT. 345 

find the same grand ideas engaging the intellects of men 
widely dispersed, so that a novelty in art or science is 
generally disputed between contending nations. But 
this synchronous development of power is symptomatic 
of some wide-spread tendency, which alters the ordinary 
course of affairs; and we see in the Canterbury Tales 
the dawning of the Keformation; in Shakspeare and 
Bacon the inauguration of a new order of government 
and manners; in Locke and Milton a still farther libera- 
tion from the chains of a worn-out philosophy; in Watt, 
and Fulton, and Cartwright, we see the spread of civili- 
zation and power. In Walter Scott and Wordsworth, 
and the wonderful galaxy of literary stars who illumi- 
nated the beginning of this century, we see Waterloo 
and Peace, a widening of national sympathies, and the 
opening of a great future career to all the nations of the 
world. For nothing is so true an index of the state and 
prospects of a people as the healthfulness and honest 
taste of its literature. It was in this sense that Flet- 
cher of Saltoun said, (or quoted,) " Give me the making 
of the ballads of a people, and I don't care who makes 
the laws." While we have such pure and wholesome 
literature as is furnished us by Hallam, and Macaulay, 
and Alison, by Tennyson, Dickens, Thackeray, and the 
rest, philosophy like Hamilton's, and science like Her- 
schel's and Faraday's, we have no cause to look forward 
with doubt or apprehension. 

" Naught shall make us rue 
If England to herself do rest but true." 

But those pioneers of the Fourteenth Century had 
dangers and difficulties to encounter from which their 
successors have been free. It is a very different thing 
for authors to write for the applause of an appreciating 
public, and for them to create an appreciating public for 
themselves. Their audience must at first have been 



346 FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 

hostile. First, the critical and scholarly part of the 
world was offended with the bad taste of writing in the 
modern ]anguages at all. Secondly, the pitch at which 
they struck the national note was too high for the ears 
of the vulgar. A correct and dignified use of the 
spoken tongue, the conveyance, in ordinary and familiar 
words, of lofty or poetical thoughts, filled both those 
classes with surprise. To the scholar it seemed good 
materials enveloped in a very unworthy covering. To 
" the general" it seemed an attempt to deprive them of 
their vernacular phrases and bring bad grammar and 
coarse expressions into disrepute. Petrarch was so 
conscious of this that he speaks apologetically of his 
sonnets in Italian, and founds his hope of future fame 
on his Latin verses. But more important than the 
poems of Dante and Chaucer, or the prose of Boccaccio, 
was the introduction of the new literature represented 
by Froissart. Hitherto chronicles had for the most part 
consisted of the record of such wandering rumours as 
reached a monastery or were gathered in the religious 
pilgrimages of holy men. Mingled, even the best of 
them, with the credulity of inexperienced and simple 
minds, their effect was lost on the contemporary gene- 
ration by the isolation of the writers. Nobody beyond 
the convent-walls knew what the learned historians of 
the establishment had been doing. Their writings were 
not brought out into the light of universal day, and a 
knowledge of European society gathered point by point, 
by comparing, analyzing, and contrasting the various 
statements contained in those dispersed repositories. 
But at this time there came into notice the most inquir- 
ing, enterprising, picturesque, and entertaining chroni- 
cler that had ever appeared since Herodotus read the 
result of his personal travels and sagacious inquiries to 
the assembled multitudes of Greece. 



FROISSART. 347 

John Froissart, called by the courtesy of the time Sir 
John, in honour of his being priest and chaplain, de- 
voted a long life to the collection of the fullest and most 
trustworthy accounts of all the events and personages 
characteristic of his time. From 1326, when his labours 
commenced, to 1400, when his active pen stood still, 
nothing happened in any part of Europe that the Paul 
Pry of the period did not rush off to verify on the spot. 
If he heard of an assemblage of knights going on at the 
extremities of France or in the centre of Germany, of 
a tournament at Bordeaux, a court gala in Scotland, or 
a marriage festival at Milan, his travels began, — whether 
in the humble guise of a solitary horseman with his 
portmanteau behind his saddle and a single greyhound 
at his heels, as he jogged wearily across the Border, till 
he finally arrived in Edinburgh, or in his grander style 
of equipment, gallant steed, with hackney led beside 
him, and four dogs of high race gambolling round his 
horse, as he made his dignified journey from Ferrara to 
Eome. Wherever life was to be seen and painted, the 
indefatigable Froissart was to be found. Whatever he 
had gathered up on former expeditions, whatever he 
learned on his present tour, down it went in his own 
exquisite language, with his own poetical impression of 
the pomps and pageantries he beheld ; and when at the 
end of his journey he reached the court of prince or 
potentate, no higher treat could be offered to the "noble 
lords and ladies bright" than to form a glittering circle 
round the enchanting chronicler and listen to what he 
had written. From palace to palace, from castle to 
castle, the unwearied "picker-up of unconsidered trifles" 
(which, however, were neither trifles nor unconsidered, 
when their true value became known, as giving life and 
reality to the annals of a whole period) pursued his 
happy way, certain of a friendly reception when he 



848 FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 

arrived, and certain of not losing his time by negligence 
or blindness on the road. If he overtakes a stately cava- 
lier, attended by squires and men-at-arms, he enters into 
conversation, drawing out the experiences of the vene- 
rable warrior by relating to him all he knew of things 
and persons in which he took an interest. And when 
they put up at some hostelry on the road, and while 
the gallant knight was sound asleep on his straw-stuffed 
couch, and his followers were wallowing amid the rushes 
on the parlour floor, Froissart was busy with pen and 
note-book, scoring down all the old gentleman had told 
him, all the fights he had been present at, and the secret 
history (if any) of the councils of priests and kings. In 
this way knights in distant parts of the world became 
known to each other. The same voice which described 
to Douglas at Dalkeith the exploits of the Prince of 
Wales sounded the praises of Douglas in the ears of the 
Black Prince at Bordeaux. A community of sentiment 
was produced between the upper ranks of all nations by 
this common register of their acts and feelings ; and 
knighthood received its most ennobling consummation 
in these imperishable descriptions, at the very time when 
its political and military influence came to a close. 
Froissart' s Chronicles are the epitaph of feudalism, 
written indeed while it was yet alive, but while its 
strength was only the convulsive energy of approaching 
death. The standard of knightly virtue became raised 
in proportion as knightly power decayed. In the same 
way as the increased civilization and elevating influences 
of the time clothed the Church in colours borrowed 
from the past, while its real influence was seriously im- 
paired, the expiring embers of knighthood occasionally 
flashed up into something higher j and in this century 
we read of Du Guesclin of France, Walter Manny and 
Edward the Third of England, and many others, who 



CHIVALRY. 349 

illustrated the order with qualifications it had never 
possessed in its palmiest state. 

Courtrai was fought and Amadis de Gaul written 
almost at the same time. Let us therefore mark, as a 
characteristic of the period we have reached, the decay 
of knighthood, or feudalism in its armour of proof, and 
the growth at the same time of a sense of honour and 
generosity, which contrasted strangely in its softened 
and sentimentalized refinement with the harshness and 
cruelty which still clung to the ordinary affairs of life. 
Thus the young conqueror of Poictiers led his captive 
John into London with the respectful attention of a 
grateful subject to a crowned king. He waited on him 
at table, and made him forget the humiliation of defeat 
and the griefs of imprisonment in the sympathy and 
reverence with which he was everywhere surrounded. 
This same prince was regardless of human life or suffer- 
ing where the theatrical show of magnanimity was not 
within his reach, bloodthirsty and tyrannical, and is de- 
clared by the chronicler himself to be of " a high, over- 
bearing spirit, and cruel in his hatred." It shows, how- 
ever, what an advance had already been made in the 
influence of public opinion, when we read how generally 
the treatment of the noble captive, John of France, was 
appreciated. In former ages, and even at present in 
nations of a lower state of feelings, the kind treatment 
of a fallen enemy, or the sparing of a helpless popula- 
tion, would be attributed to weakness or fear. Chivalry, 
which was an attempt to amalgamate the Christian 
virtues with the rougher requirements of the feudal code, 
taught the duty of being pitiful as well as brave. And 
though at this period that feeling only existed between 
knight and knight, and was not yet extended to their 
treatment of the common herd, the principle was 
asserted that war could be carried on without personal 

30 



3 &0 FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 

animosity, and that courage, endurance, and the other 
knightly qualities were to be admired as much in an 
enemy as a friend. 

There was, however, another reason for this besides 
the natural admiration which great deeds are sure to 
call forth in natures capable of performing them ) and 
that was, that Europe was divided into petty sove- 
reignties, too weak to maintain their independence with- 
out foreign aid, too proud to submit to another govern- 
ment, and trusting to the support their money or influ- 
ence could procure. In all countries, therefore, there 
existed bodies of mercenary soldiers — or Free Lances, 
as they were called — claiming the dignit}^ and rank of 
knights and noblemen, who never knew whether the 
men they were fighting to-day might not be their com- 
rades and followers to-morrow. In Italy, always a 
country of divisions and enmities, there were armed com- 
batants secured on either side. Unconnected with the 
country they defended by any ties of kindred or allegi- 
ance, they found themselves opposed to a body, perhaps 
of their countrymen, certainly of their former com- 
panions ; and, except so much as was required to earn 
their pay and preserve their reputation, they did nothing 
that might be injurious to their temporary foes. Battles 
accordingly were fought where feats of horsemanship 
and dexterity at their weapons were shown ; where rushes 
were made into the vacant space between the armies 
by contending warriors, and horse and man acquitted 
themselves with the acclamations, and almost with the 
safety, of a charge in the amphitheatre at Astley's. 
But no blood was spilt, no life was taken; and a long 
summer day has seen a confused melee going on be- 
tween the hired combatants of two cities or principali- 
ties, without a single casualty more serious than a cava- 
lier thrown from his horse and unable to rise from the 



GREAT EVENTS OF THE CENTURY. 351 

weight and tightness of his armour. Fights of this 
kind could scarcely be considered in earnest, and we are 
not surprised to find that the burden and heat of an 
engagement was thrown upon the light-armed foot : we 
gather, indeed, towards the end of Froissart's Chronicles, 
that while the cavaliers persisted in endeavouring to 
distinguish their individual prowess, as at the battle of 
Navareta in Spain, and got into confusion in their 
eagerness of assault, "the sharpness of the English 
arrows began to be felt," and the fate of the battle de- 
pended on the unflinching line and impregnable solidity 
of the archers and foot-soldiers. These latter took a 
deeper interest in the result than the more showy per- 
formers, and were not carried away by the vanities of 
personal display. 

Look at the year 1300, with the jubilee of Boniface 
going on. Look at 1400, with the death of Chaucer and 
Froissart, and the enthroning of Henry the Fourth, and 
what an amount of incident, of change and improve- 
ment, has been crowded into the space ! The rise of 
national literatures, the softening of feudalism, the de- 
cline of Church power, — these — illustrated by Dante and 
Chaucer, by the alteration in the art of war, and above 
all, perhaps, by the translation of the Bible into the 
vulgar tongue— were not only the fruits gained for the 
present, but the promise of greater things to come. 
There will be occasional backslidings after this time; 
but the onward progress is steady and irresistible : the 
regressions are but the reflux waves in an advancing 
tide, caused by the very force and vitality of the great 
sea beyond. And after this view of some of the main 
features of the century, we shall take a very cursory 
glance at some of the principal events on which the por- 
traiture is founded. 

It is a bad sign of the early part of this period that 
our great landmarks are still battles and invasions. 



352 



FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 



After Courtrai in 1302, where the nobility rushed blind- 
fold into a natural ditch, we come upon Bannockburn in 
1314, where Edward the Second, not compre- 
hending the aim of his more politic father, — 
whose object was to counterpoise the growing power of 
the French monarchy by consolidating his influence at 
home, — had marched rather to revenge his outraged 
dignity than to establish his denied authority, and was 
signally defeated by Eobert Bruce. Is it not possible 
that the stratagem by which the English chivalry 
suffered so much by means of the pits dug for their re- 
ception in the space in front of the Scottish lines was 
borrowed from Courtrai, — art supplying in that dry 
plain near Stirling what nature had furnished to the 
marshy Brabant ? However this may be, the same fatal 
result ensued. Pennon and standard, waving plume 
and flashing sword, disappeared in those yawning gulfs, 
and at the present hour very rusty spurs and fragments 
of broken helmets are dug from beneath the soil to mark 
the greatness and the quality of the slaughter. Mean- 
time, in compact phalanx — protected by the knights and 
gentlemen on the flanks, but left to its own free action 
— the Scottish array bore on. Strong spear and sharp 
sword did the rest, and the English army, shorn of its 
cavalry, disheartened by the loss of its leaders, and 
finally deserted by its pusillanimous king, retreated in 
confusion, and all hope of retaining the country by the 
right of conquest was forever laid aside. Poor Edward 
had, in appalling consciousness of his own imperfections, 
applied to the Pope for permission to rub himself with 
an ointment that would make him brave. Either the 
Pope refused his consent or the ointment failed of its 
purpose. Nothing could rouse a brave thought in the 
heart of the fallen Plantagenet. Sir Giles de Argentine 
might have been more effectual than all the unguents in 
the world. He led the king by the bridle till he saw 



DEFEAT OE THE FLEMINGS. 353 

him in a place of safety. He then stopped his horse 
and said, " It has never been my custom to fly, and here 
I must take my fortune." Saying this, he put spurs to 
his horse, and, crying out, "An Argentine \" charged the 
squadron of Edward Bruce, and was borne down by the 
force of the Scottish spears. The fugitive king galloped 
in terror to the castle of Dunbar, and shipped off by sea 
to Berwick. 

The next battle is so strongly corroborative of the 
failing supremacy of heavy armour, and the rising im- 
portance of the well-trained citizens, that it is worth 
mention, although at first sight it seems to controvert 
both these statements ; for it was a fight in which cer- 
tain courageous burghers were mercilessly exterminated 
by gorgeously-caparisoned knights. The townsmen of 
Bruges and Ypres had grown so proud and pugnacious 
i-: „ that in 1328 they advanced to Cassel to do 

A.D. 1328. . -r . 

battle with the young King of France, Philip 
of Yalois, at the head of all his chivalry. There was a 
vast amount of mutual contempt in the two armies. 
The leader of the bold Flemings, who was known as 
Little Jack, entered the enemy's camp in disguise, and 
found young lords in splendid gowns proceeding from 
point to point, gossiping, visiting, and interchanging 
their invitations. Making his way back, he ordered a 
charge at once. The rush was nearly successful, and 
was only checked within a few yards of the royal tent. 
But the check was tremendous. The bloated burghers, 
filled with pride and gorged with wealth, had thought 
proper to ensconce their unwieldy persons in cuirasses 
as brilliant and embarrassing as the armour of the 
knights. The knights, however, were on horseback, 
and the embattled townsfolk were on foot. Great was 
the slaughter, useless the attempt to escape, and thir- 
teen thousand were overborne and smothered. Ten 

X 30* 



3 54 FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 

thousand more were executed by some form of law, 
and the Bourgeoisie taught to rely for its safety on its 
agility and compactness, and not on " helm or hauberk's 
twisted mail." 

The crop of battles grows rich and plentiful, for 
Edward the Third and Philip of Yalois are rival kings 
and warriors, and may be taken as the representatives 
of the two states of society which were brought at this 
time face to face. For Edward, though as true a knight 
as Amadis himself in his own person, in policy was a 
favourer of the new ideas. When the war broke out, 
Philip behaved as if no change had taken place in the 
seat of power and the world had still continued divided 
between the lords and their armed retainers. He threw 
himself for support on the military service of his tenants 
and the aristocratic spirit of his nobles. Edward, wiser 
but less romantic, turned for assistance to the Commons 
of England, — bought over their good will and copious 
contributions by privileges granted to their trades, — in- 
vited skilled workmen over from Flanders, which, with 
the freest spirit in Europe, was under the least improved 
of the feudal governments, — and established woollen- 
works at York, fustian-works at Norwich, serges at Col- 
chester, and kerseys in Devonshire. Mills were whirling- 
round in all the counties, and ships coming in untaxed 
at every harbour. Fortunately, as is always the case in 
this country, it was seen that the success of one class 
of the people was beneficial to every other class. The 
baron got more rent for his land and better cloth for his 
apparel by the prosperity of his manufacturing neigh- 
bours. Money was voted readily in support of a king 
who entered into alliance with their best customers, the 
men of Ghent and Bruges; and at the head of all the 
levies which the parliament's liberality enabled him to 
raise were the knights and gentlemen of England, totally 
freed now from any bias towards the French or prejudice 



VICTORY OP IIELVOET SLUYS. 355 

against the Saxon ; for they spoke the English tongue, 
dressed in English broadcloth, sang English ballads, and 
astonished the men of Gascony and Guienne with the 
vehemence of their unmistakably English oaths. Yet 
some of them held lands in feudal subjection to the 
Erench king. Elanders itself confessed the same sove- 
reignty ; and men of delicate consciences might feel un- 
easy if they lifted the sword against their liege lord. To 
soothe their scruples, James Yan Arteveldt, the Brewer 
of Ghent, suggested to Edward the propriety of his as- 
suming the title of King of France. The rebellious free- 
holders would then be in their duty in supporting their 
liege's claims. So Edward, founding ujdoii the birth of 
his mother, the daughter of the last King, Philip le 
Bel, — who was excluded by the Salic law, or at least by 
French custom, from the throne, — made claim to the 
crown of St. Louis, and transmitted the barren title to 
all his successors till the reign of George the Fourth. 
As if in right of his property on both sides of the Chan- 
nel, Edward converted it into his exclusive domain. 
He so entirely exterminated the navy of France, and 

••a i« impressed that chivalrous nation with the dan- 
a.d. 1340. r 

ger of the seas by the victory of Helvoet Sluys, 
that for several centuries the command of the strait was 
left undisputed to England. Philip had endeavoured to 
obtain the mastery of it with a fleet of a hundred and 
fifty ships, mounted by forty thousand men. The Geno- 
ese had furnished an auxiliary squadron, and also a 
commander-in-chief, of the name of Barbavara. But 
the French admiral was a civilian of the name of Bahu- 
chet, who thought the safest plan was the best, and kept 
his whole force huddled up in the commodious harbour. 
Edward collected a fleet of scarcely inferior strength, 
and fell upon the enemy as they lay within the port. It 
was in fact a fight on the land, for they ranged so close 
that they almost touched each other, and the gallant 



356 FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 

Bahuchet preserved himself from sea-sickness at the 
expense of all their lives. For the English archers made 
an incredible havoc on their crowded decks, and the 
pike-men boarded with irresistible power. Twenty 
thousand were slain in that fearful melee; and Edward, 
to show how sincere he was in his claim upon the throne 
of France, hanged the unfortunate Bahuchet as a traitor. 
The man deserved his fate as a coward : so we need not 
waste much sympathy on the manner of his death. This 
success with his ships was soon followed by the better- 
known victory of Crecy, 1346, and the capture of Calais. 
In ten years afterwards, the crowning triumph 
of Poictiers completed the destruction of the 
military power of France, by a slaughter nearly as great 
as that at Sluys and Crecy. In addition to the loss of 
lives in these three engagements, amounting to upwards 
of ninety thousand men, we are to consider the im- 
poverishment of the country by the exorbitant ransoms 
claimed for the release of prisoners. John, the French 
king, was valued at three million crowns of gold, — an 
immense sum, which it would have exhausted the king- 
dom to raise ; and, in addition to those destructive fights 
and crushing exactions, France was further weakened 
by the insurrection of the peasantry and the frightful 
massacres by which it was put down. If to these 
causes of weakness we add the depopulation produced 
by the unequalled pestilence, called the Plague of 
Florence, which spread all over the world, and in the 
space of a year carried off nearly a third of the inhabit- 
ants of Europe, we shall be justified in believing that 
France was reduced to the lowest condition she has ever 
reached, and that only the dotage of Edward, the death 
of the Black Prince, and the accession of a king like 
Richard II., saved that noble country from being, for a 
while at least, tributary and subordinate to her island- 
conqueror. 



FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 



lEmperots of ©ennattg. 

A.D. 

1400. Eupert. 
1410. Jossus. 

1410. SlGISMUND. 

House of Austria. 
1438. Albert II. 
1440. Frederick IV. 
1493. Maximilian I. 

iSms* of lEnglan*. 



Henry IV. 

Henry V. 
1422. Henry VI. 
1461. Edward IV. 
1483. Edward V. 
1483. Eichard III. 
1485. Henry VII. 



1399 
1413 



3Emperors of tfjc 3Sast 

A.D. 

Manuel Pal^ologus. — 
(cont.) 
1425. John Pal^eologus II. 

1448. CoNSTANTINE XIII., (Pa- 
L^OLOGUS.) 

1453. Capture of Constantino- 
ple by the Turks, and 
close of the Eastern 
Empire. 

Sultans of &utKc$. 

1451. Mohammed II. 
1481. Bajazet II. 

Ittngs of ^France. 

Charles VI. — {cont.) 
1422. Charles VII. 
1461. Louis XL 
1483. Charles VIII. 
1498. Louis XII. 



itmfia of Scotlanb. 

Kobert III. — {cont.) 
1406. James I. 
1437. James II. 
1460. James III. 
1488. James IV. 

1452. Invention of Printing. 

1455. Wars of the Eoses begin. 

1483. Luther born. 1492. Discovert of America. 

iSmtneut Jffien. 

John Huss, (1370-1415,) Ximines. 



itms* of S>P«tn» 

1479. Union of the Kingdom 
under Ferdinand and 
Isabella. 



THE FIFTEENTH CENTUKY. 

DECLINE OP FEUDALISM AGINCOURT — JOAN OF ARC — THE 

PRINTING-PRESS DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 

The whole period from the twelfth to the fifteenth 
century has generally been considered so unvarying in 
its details, one century so like another, that it has been 
thought sufficient to class them all under the general 
name of the Middle Ages. Old Monteil, indeed, the 
author of " The French People of Yarious Conditions," 
declines to individualize any age during that lengthened 
epoch, for "feudalism," he says, "is as little capable of 
change as the castles with which it studded the land." 
But a closer inspection does by no means justify this 
declaration. From time to time we have seen what 
great changes have taken place. The external walls of 
the baronial residence may continue the same, but vast 
alterations have occurred within. The rooms have got 
a more modern air ; the moat has begun to be dried up, 
and turned into a bowling-green ; the tilt-yard is occa- 
sionally converted into a garden ; and, in short, in all 
the civilized countries of Europe the life of society has 
accumulated at the heart. Power is diffused from the 
courts of kings ; and instead of the spirit of indepen- 
dence and opposition to the royal authority which 
characterized former centuries, we find the courtiers' arts 
more prevalent now than the pride of local grandeur. 
The great vassals of the Crown are no longer the rivals 
of their nominal superior, but submissively receive his 

359 



360 FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 

awards, or endeavour to obtain the sanction of his name 
to exactions which they would formerly have practised 
in their own. Monarchy, in fact, becomes the spirit of 
the age, and nobility sinks willingly into the subordinate 
rank. This itself was a great blow to the feudal system, 
for the essence of that organized society was equality 
among its members, united to subordination of conven- 
tional rank, — a strange and beautiful style of feeling 
between the highest and the lowest of that manly brother- 
hood, which made the simple chevalier equal to the 
king as touching their common knighthood, — of which 
we have at the present time the modernized form in the 
feeling which makes the loftiest in the land recognise 
an equal and a friend in the person of an untitled gen- 
tleman. Eut this latter was to be the result of the 
equalizing effect of education and character. In the fif- 
teenth century, feudalism, represented by the great pro- 
prietors, was about to expire, as it had already perished 
in the decay of its armed and mailed representatives in 
the field of battle. By no lower hand than its own 
could the nobility be overthrown either in France or 
England. The accident of a feeble kino- in both coun- 
tries was the occasion of an internecine struggle, — not, 
as it would have been in the tenth century, for the pos- 
session of the crown, but for the custody of the wearer 
of it. The insanity of Charles YI. almost exterminated 
the lords of France j the weakness of Henry YI. and 
the Wars of the Koses produced the same result in 
England. It seemed as if in both countries an epidemic 
madness had burst out among the nobility, which drove 
them to their destruction. Wildly contending with 
each other, neglecting and oppressing the common 
people, the lords and barons were unconscious of the 
silent advances of a power which was about to over- 
shadow them all. And, as if to drive away from them 



DECLINE OF NOBILITY. 301 

the sympathy which their fathers had known how to 
excite among the lower classes by their kindness and 
protection, they seemed determined to obliterate every 
vestige of respect which might cling to their ancient 
possessions and historic names, by the most unheard- 
of cruelty and falsehood in their treatment of each 
other. 

The leader of one of the parties which divided France 
was John, son of Philip the Hardy, prince of the blood 
royal and Duke of Burgundy. The leader of the other 
party was Louis of Orleans, brother of the demented 
king, and the gayest cavalier and most accomplished 
gentleman of his time. The Burgundian had many 
advantages in his contest for the reins of government. 
The wealth and population of the Low t Countries made 
him as powerful as any of the princes of Europe, and 
he could at all times secure the alliance of England to 
the most nefarious of his schemes by the bribe of a 
treaty of trade and navigation. He accordingly brought 
his great possessions in Flanders to the aid of his French 
ambition, and secured the almost equally important 
assistance of the University of Paris, by giving in his 
adhesion to the Pope it had chosen and denying the 
authority of the Pope of his rival Orleans. Orleans had 
also offended the irritable population of Paris by making 
his vows, on some solemn occasion, by the bones of St. 
Denis which adorned the shrine of the town called after 
his name, — whereas it was well known to every Parisian 
that the real bones of the patron of France were those 
which were so religiously preserved in the treasury of 
Notre Dame. The clergy of the two altars took up 
the quarrel, and as much hostility was created by the 
rival relics of St. Denis and Paris as by the rival pontiffs 
of Avignon and Rome. Thus the Church, which in 
earlier times had been a bond of unity, was one of the 

31 



302 FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 

chief causes of dissension; and the result in a few years 
was seen in the attempt made by France to shake off, 
as much as possible, the supremacy of both the divided 
Popes, as it managed to shake off entirely the yoke of 
the divided nobility. 

Quarrels and reconciliations among the princes, feasts 
and festivals among the peerage, and the most relentless 
treatment of the citizens, were the distinguishing marks 
of the opening of this century. Isabella of Bavaria, 
the shameless wife of the hapless Charles, added a great 
feature of infamy to the state of manners at the time, 
by the openness of her profligacy, and her neglect of all 
the duties of wife and queen. Rioting with the thought- 
less Orleans, while her husband was left to the misery 
of his situation, unwashed, unshorn, and clothed in rags 
and filth, the abandoned woman roused every manly 
heart in all the land against the cause she aided. Rely- 
ing on this national disgust, the wily Burgundian waited 
his opportunity, and revenged his private wrongs by 
what he afterwards called the patriotic dagger of an 

, JAW assassin. On the nip-ht of the 23d of December, 
a.d. 1407. to , ' 

1407, the gay and handsome Louis was lured by 
a false message from the queen's quarters to a distant 
part of the town, and was walking in his satin mantle, 
twirling his glove in his hand, and humming the burden 
of a song, when he was set on by ten or twelve of the 
adherents of his enemy, stabbed, and beaten long after 
he lay dead on the pavement, and was then left motion- 
less and uncared-for under the shade of the high house- 
walls of the Vieille Rue du Temple. 

Public conscience was not very acute at that time; 
and, although no man for a moment doubted the hand 
that had guided the blow, the Duke of Burgundy was 
allowed to attend the funeral of his murdered cousin, 
and to hold the pall in the procession, and to weep 



JEAN SANS-PEUR. 3G3 

louder than any as the coffin was lowered into the vault. 
But the common feelings of humanity were roused at 
last. People remembered the handsome, kindly, merry- 
hearted Orleans thus suddenly struck low, and the 
ominous looks of the Parisians warned the powerful 
Burgundy that it was time to take his hypocrisy and 
his tears out of the sight of honest men. He slipped 
out of the city, and betook himself to his Flemish 
states. But the helm was now without a steersman; 
and, while all were looking for a guide out of the con- 
fusion into which the appalling incident had brought 
the realm, the guilty duke himself, armed cap-a-pie, and 
surrounded by a body-guard which silenced all opposi- 
tion, made his solemn entry into the town, and fixed on 
the door of his hotel the emblematic ornament of two 
spears, one sharp at the point as if for immediate battle, 
and one blunted and guarded as if for a friendly joust. 
Eloquence is never long absent when power is in want 
of an oration. A great meeting was held, in which, by 
many brilliant arguments and incontrovertible examples 
from holy writ and other histories, John Petit proved, to 
the entire satisfaction of everybody who did not wish 
to be slaughtered on the spot, that the doing to death 
of the Duke of Orleans was a good deed, and that the 
doer was entitled to the thanks of a grateful country. 
The thanks were accordingly given, and the murderer 
was at the height of his ambition. As a warning to 
the worthy citizens of what they had to expect if they 
rebelled against his authority, he took the opportunity 
of hurrying northward to his states, where the men of 
Liege were in revolt, and, having broken their ill-formed 
squares, committed such slaughter upon them as only 
the madness of fear and hatred could have suggested. 
Dripping with the blood of twenty-four thousand arti- 
sans, he returned to Paris, where the citizens were 



304 FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 

hushed into silence, and perhaps admiration, by the 
terrors of his appearance. They called him John the 
Fearless, — a noble title, most inadequately acquired; 
but, in spite of their flattery and their submission, he 
did not feel secure without the presence of his faithful 
subjects. He therefore summoned his Flemings and 
Burgundians to share his triumphs, and a loose was 
given to all their desires. They pillaged, burned, and 
destroyed as if in an enemy's country, encamping out- 
side the walls, and giving evident indications of an in- 
tention to force their way into the streets. But the sight 
of gore, though terrifying at first, sets the tamest of 
animals wild. The Parisians smelt the bloody odour 
and made ready for the fray. The formidable incorpo- 
ration of the Butchers rose knife in hand, and at the 
command of their governor prepared to preserve the 
peace of the city. Burgundians and Orleanists were 
equally to be feared, and by a curious coincidence both 
those parties were at the gate ; for the Count of Arma- 
gnac, father-in-law of the orphan Duke of Orleans, had 
assumed the leadership of the party, and had come up 
to Paris at the head of his infuriated Gascons and the 
men of Languedoc. North and South were again 
ranged in hostile ranks, and inside the walls there was a 
reign of terror and an amount of misery never equalled 
till that second reign of terror which is still the darkest 
spot in the memory of old men yet alive. No man 
could put faith in his neighbour. The murder of the 
Duke of Orleans had dissolved all confidence in the 
word of princes. One half of France was ready to 
draw against the other. Each half was anxious for 
support, from whatever quarter it came, and to gain the 
destruction of their rivals would sacrifice the interests 
of the nation. 

But the same spirit of disunion and extirpation of 



FIRST LAW AGAINST HERETICS. 3G5 

ancient landmarks was at work in England. The acces- 
sion of Henry the Fourth was not effected without the 
opposition of the adherents of the former king and cf 
the supporters, on general principles, of the legitimate 
line. There were treasons, and plots, and pitiless exe- 
cutions. The feudal chiefs were no longer the compact 
body which could give laws both to King and Parlia- 
ment, but ranged themselves in opposite camps and 
waited for the spoils of the vanquished side. The 
clergy unanimously came to the aid of the usurper on 
his faithful promise to exempt them from taxation ; and, 
by thus throwing their own proportion of the public 
burdens on the body of the people, they sundered the 
alliance which had always hitherto subsisted between 
the Church and the lower class. Another ' bribe was 
held out to the clerical order for its support to the 
„._ unlineal crown by the surrender to their ven- 

A.D. 1401. J 

geance of any heretics they could discover. In 
the second year of this reign, accordingly, we find a law 
enabling the priests to burn, " on some high and con- 
spicuous piece of ground/' any who dissented from their 
faith. This is the first legal sanction in England to the 
logic of flame and fagot. How dreadfully this permis- 
sion was used, we shall see ere many years elapse. In 
the mean time, it is worth while to remark that in pro- 
portion as the Church lost in popularity and affection it 
gained in legal privilege. While it was strong it did 
not need to be cruel \ and if it had continued its care of 
the poor and helpless, it would have been able to leave 
Wickliff to his dissertations on its doctrinal errors un- 
disturbed. A Church which is found to be nationally 
beneficial, and which endears itself to its adherents by 
the practical graces of Christianity, will never be over- 
thrown, or even weakened, by any theoretical defects in 
its creeds or formularies. It was perhaps, therefore, a 

31* 



366 FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 

fortunate circumstance that the Church of Eome had 
departed as much by this time from the path of honesty 
and usefulness as from the simplicity of gospel truth. 
The Bible might have been looked at in vain, even in 
Wickliff's translation, if its meanings had not been 
rendered plain by the lives and principles of the clergy. 
Henry the Fifth, feeling the same necessity of clerical 
support which had thrown his father into the hands of 
the Church, left nothing untried to attach it to his cause. 
All the opposition which had been offered to its claims 
had hitherto been confined to men of low rank, and 
generally to members of its own body. Wickliff him- 
self had been but a country vicar, and had been un- 
noticed and despised in his small parsonage at Lutter- 
worth. But three-and-twenty years after he was dead, 
his name was celebrated far and wide as the enemy of 
constituted authority and a heretic of the most dan- 
gerous kind. His guilt consisted in nothing whatever 
but in having translated the Bible into English; but the 
fact of his having done so was patent to all. No wit- 
nesses were required. The bones of the old man were 
dug up from their resting-place in the quiet churchyard 
in Leicestershire, carried ignominiously to Oxford, and 
burned amid the howls and acclamations of an infuriated 
mob of priests and doctors. This was in 1409. But, in 
his character of heretic and unbeliever, Wickliff had 
high associates in this same year; for the General 
Council sitting at Pisa declared the two Popes — of 
Avignon and Eome — who still continued to divide the 
Christian world, to be "heretics, perjurers, and schisma- 
tics." 

Europe, indeed, was ripe for change in almost all the 
relations both of Church and State. There would seem 
no close connection between Bohemia and England; yet 
in a very short time the doctrines of Wickliff penetrated 



LORD COBHAM BURNT. 367 

to Prague. There Huss and Jerome prcaehed against 
the enormities and contradictions of the Romish system, 
and bitterly paid for their presumption in the fires of 
Constance before many years had passed. But in 
England the effects of the new revelation of the hidden 
gospel had been stronger than even at Prague. Public 
opinion, however, divided itself into two very different 
channels; and while the whole nation listened with open 
ear to the denunciations rising everywhere against the 
corruption, pride, and sensuality of the priesthood, it 
rushed at the same time into the wildest excesses of 
cruelty against the opponents of any of the doctrinal 
errors or superstitious beliefs in which it had been 
brought up. In the same year in which several persons 
were burnt in Smithfield as supporters of "Wickliff and 
the Bible, the Parliament sent up addresses to the 
Crown, advising the king to seize the temporalities of 
the Church, and to apply the riches wasted on luxurious 
monks and nuns to the payment of his soldiers. Henry 
the Fifth adroitly availed himself of the double direction 
in which the popular feeling ran. He gained over the 
priesthood by exterminating the opponents of their 
ceremonies and faith, and rewarded himself by occasion- 
ally confiscating the revenues of a dozen or two of the 
more notorious monasteries. In 1417 a heavier sacrifice 
was demanded of him than his mere presence at the 
burning of a plebeian heretic like John Badby, whose 
execution he had attended at Smithfield in 1410. He 
was required to give up into the hands of the Church 
the great and noble Oldcastle, Lord Cobham. The 
Church, as if to mark its triumph, did not examine the 
accused on any point connected with civil or political 
affairs. It questioned him solely on his religious beliefs; 
and as it found him unconvinced of the necessity of con- 
fession to a priest, of pilgrimages to the shrines of saints, 



368 FIFTEENTH^ CENTURY. 

of the worship of images, and of the doctrine of transub- 
stantiation, it delivered him over to the secular arm, and 
the stout old soldier was taken to St. Giles's-in-the-Fields, 
and suspended, by an iron chain round his body, above a 
fire, to die by the slowest and most painful of deaths. 
But, in this yielding up of a nobleman to the vengeance 
of the priesthood, Henry had a double motive : he terri- 
fied the proudest of the barons, and attached to himself 
the other bodies in the State. The people were still 
profoundly ignorant, and looked on the innovators as 
the enemies both of God and man. And nothing but 
this can account for the astonishing spectacle presented 
by Europe at this date. The Church torn by contending 
factions — three Popes at one time — and council arrayed 
against council; every nation disgusted with its own 
priesthood, and enthusiasm bursting out in the general 
confusion into the wildest excesses of fanaticism and 
vice, — and yet a total incapacity in any country of de- 
vising means of amendment. Great efforts were made, 
by wise and holy men Avithin the Church itself, to shake 
off the impediments to its development and increase. 
Keclamations were made, more in sorrow than in anger, 
against the universal depravation of morals and beliefs. 
The Popes were not unmoved with these complaints, 
and gave credence to the forebodings of evil which rose 
from every heart. Yet the network of custom, the 
authority of tradition, and the unchangeableness of 
Koman policy marred every effort at self-reformation. 
An opening was apparently made for the introduction 
of improvement, by the declaration of the supremacy 
of general councils, and the cessation of the great schism 
of the West on the nomination of Martin the 

A.D. 1429. 

Fifth to the undisputed chair. But the force of 
circumstances was irresistible. Cardinals who approved 
of the declaration while members of the council repu- 



BORGIA. 369 

diated its acts when, by good fortune, they succeeded to 
the tiara ; and one of them even ventured the astound- 
ing statement that in his character of iEneas Sylvius, 
and approver of the decree of Basle, he was guilty of 
damnable sin, but was possessed of immaculate virtue in 
the character of Paul the Second. It was obvious that 
this unnatural state of things could not last. An es- 
tablishment conscious of its defects, but unable to throw 
them off, and finally forced to the awful necessity of de- 
fending them by the foulest and most unpardonable 
means, might have read the inevitable result in every 
page of history. But worse remained behind. There 
sat upon the chair of St. Peter, in the year 1492, the 
most depraved and wicked of mankind. No earthly 
ruler had equalled him in profligacy and the coarser 
vices of cruelty and oppression since the death of the 
Roman Nero. This was a man of the name of Borgia, 
who fixed his infamous mark on the annals of the 
Papacy as Alexander the Sixth. While this bloodthirsty 
ruffian was at the summit of sacerdotal power — this 
poisoner of his friends, this polluter of his family circle 
with unimaginable crimes — as the visible representative 
upon earth of the Church of Christ, what hope could 
there be of amendment in the lower orders of the clergy, 
or continuance of men's belief in the popish claims ? 
Long before this, in 1442, the falsehood of the pretended 
donation of Constantine, on which the Popes founded 
their territorial rights, was triumphantly proved by the 
learned Valla ; and at the end of the century the reve- 
rence of mankind for the successor of the Prince of the 
Apostles was exposed to a trial which the authenticity 
of all the documents in the world could not have suc- 
cessfully stood, in the personal conduct of the Pope and 
his familiars. 

While this was the general state of Europe in the 
Y 



370 



FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 



fifteenth century as regards the position of the clergy, 
high and low, the Church, in all countries, threw itself 
on the protection of the kings. By the middle, or 
towards the end, of this period, there was no other 
patronage to which they could have recourse. The 
nobility in France and England were practically eradi- 
cated. All confidence between baron and baron was at 
an end, and all belief in knightly faith and honour in 
the other classes of the people. As if the time for a new 
state of society was arrived, and instruments were re- 
quired to clear the way for the approaching form, the 
nobility and gentry of England first were effectual in 
overthrowing their noble brethren in France, and then, 
with infuriate bitterness, turned their swords upon each 
other. The most rememberable general characteristic 
of this century is the consolidation of royal power. The 
king becomes despotic because the great nobility is 
overthrown and the Church stripped of its authority. 
Tired of hoping for aid from their ancient protector, the 
lowest classes cast their eyes of helplessness to the 
throne instead of to the crozier. They see in the reign- 
ing sovereign an ideal of personified Power. All other 
ideals with which the masses of the people have deluded 
themselves have passed away. The Church is stripped 
of the charm which its lofty claims and former kindness 
gave it. It is detected for the thing it is, — a corpora- 
tion for the grinding of the poor and the support of 
tyranny and wrong. The nobility is stripped also of the 
glitter which covered its harsh outlines with the glow 
of Christian qualifications. It is found to be selfish, 
faithless, untrustworthy, and divided against itself. To 
the king, then, as the last refuge of the unfortunate, as 
the embodied State, a combination, in his own person, 
of the manly virtues of the knight with the Christian 
tenderness of the priest, the public transfers all the 



SUDDEN ENLIGHTENMENT. 371 

romantic confidence it had lavished on the other two. 
And, as if to prove that this idea came to its complete- 
ness without reference to the actual holder of sovereign 
authority, we find that in France the first really despotic 
king was Louis the Eleventh, and in England the first 
king by divine right was Henry the Seventh. Two 
more unchivalrous personages never disgraced the three- 
legged stool of a scrivener. Yet they sat almost simul- 
taneously on two of earth's proudest thrones. 

No century had ever witnessed so great a change in 
manners and position as this. In others we have seen 
a gradual widening-out of thought and tendencies, all, 
however, subdued by the universal shadow in which 
every thing was carried on. But in this the progress 
was by a sudden leap from darkness into light. In 
ancient times Europe was held together by certain 
communities of interest and feeling, of which the chief 
undoubtedly was the centralization of the spiritual 
power in Rome. At the Papal Court all the nations 
were represented, and Stockholm and Saragossa were 
brought into contact by their common dependence on 
the successor of St. Peter. The courtly festivals which 
invited a knight of Scotland to cross blunted spears in 
a glittering tournament with a knight of Sicily in the 
court of ah emperor of Germany was another bond of 
union between remotest regions; and in the fourteenth 
century the indefatigable Froissart, as we remarked, 
conveyed a knowledge of one nation to another in the 
entertaining chapters with which he delighted the 
listeners in the different palaces where he set up his 
rest. But all these lights, it will be observed, illumined 
only the hill-tops, and left the valleys still obscure. 
Ambitious Churchmen encountered their brethren of all 
kindreds and tongues in the court of the Yatican ; tilt- 
ings were only for the high-born and rich, and Froissart 



372 FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 

himself poured forth his treasures only for the delight 
of lords and ladies. The ballads of the common people, 
on the other hand, had had a strongly disuniting effect. 
The songs which charmed the peasant were directed 
against the exacting priest and oppressive noble. In 
England they were generally pointed against the Nor- 
man baron, with whose harshness and pride were con- 
trasted the kindness and liberality of Eobin Hood and 
his peers. The French ballads were hostile to the 
English invader ; the Scottish poems were commemora- 
tive of the heroism of Wallace and the cruelties of the 
Southern hordes. Literatures were thus condemned to 
be hostile, because they were not lofty enough to over- 
look the boundaries of the narrow circles in which they 
moved. By slow and toilsome process books were mul- 
tiplied, — carefully copied in legible hand, and then 
chained up, like inestimable jewels, in monastery or 
palace, as too valuable to be left at large. A king's 
library was talked of as a wonder when it contained 
six or seven hundred volumes. The writings of contro- 
versialists were passed from hand to hand, and the pub- 
lication of a volume was generally achieved by its being 
read aloud at the refectory-table of the college and then 
discussed, in angry disputations, in the University Hall. 
Not one man in five hundred could read, if the book had 
been written in the plainest text; and at length the 
running hand was so indistinct as to be not much plainer 
than hieroglyphics. The discoveries, therefore, -of one 
age had all to be discovered over again in the next. 
Boger Bacon, the English monk, in the eleventh cen- 
tury, was acquainted with gunpowder, and had clear in- 
timations of many of the other inventions of more recent 
times. But what was the use of all his genius ? He 
could only write down his triumph in a book ; the book 
was carefully arranged on the shelf of his monastery; 



DISCOVERY OP PRINTING. 373 

clever men of his own society may have carried the 
report of his doings to the neighbouring establishments; 
but time passed on, those clever men died out, the book 
on the monastery-shelf was gradually covered with dust, 
and Roger Bacon became a conjurer in popular estima- 
tion, who foretold future events and took counsel from 
a supernatural brazen head. But in this century the 
art of printing was discovered and perfected. A thou- 
sand copies now darted off in all directions, cheap 
enough to be bought by the classes below the highest, 
portable enough to be carried about the person to the 
most distant lands, and in a type so large and clear that 
a very little instruction would enable the most illiterate 
to master its contents. Here was the lever that lifted 
the century at its first appearance into the light of 
modern civilization. And it came at the very nick of 
time. Men's minds were disturbed on many subjects; 
for old unreasoning obedience to authority had passed 
away. Who was to guide them in their future voyage ? 
Isolated works would no longer be of any use. Great 
scholars and acute dialecticians had been tried and 
found wanting. They only acted on the highly-educated 
class j and now it was the people in mass — the worker, 
the shopkeeper, the farmer, the merchant — who were 
anxious to be informed ; and what could a monk in a 
cell, or even Chaucer with his harp in hand, do for the 
edification of such a countless host ? People would no 
longer be fed on the dry crust of Aristotelianism or be 
satisfied with the intellectual jugglery of the Schoolmen. 
Borne had lost its guiding hand, and its restraining sword 
was also found of no avail. Some rest was to be found 
for the minds which had felt the old foundation slip 
away from them ; and in this century, thus pining for 
light, thus thrusting forward eager hands to be warmed 

32 



374 FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 

at the first ray of a new-risen sun, there were terrible 
displays of the aberrations of zeal without knowledge. 

Almost within hearing of the first motion of the press, 
incalculable numbers of enthusiasts revived the exploded 
sect of the Flagellants of former centuries, and peram- 
bulated Europe, plying the whip upon their naked backs 
and declaring that the whole of religion consisted in the 
use of the scourge. Others, more crazy still, pronounced 
the use of clothes to be evidence of an unconverted 
nature, and returned to the nakedness of our first 
parents as proof of their restoration to a state of inno- 
cence. Mortality lost all its terrors in this earnest 
search for something more than the ordinary ministra- 
tions of the faith could bestow; and in France and 
England the hideous spectacles called the Dance of 
Death were frequent. In these, under the banner of a 
grinning skeleton, the population danced with frantic 
violence, shouting, shrieking, in the exultation of the 
time, — a scene where the joyous appearance of the oc- 
cupation contrasted shockingly with the awful place in 
which the orgies were held, for the catacombs of Paris, 
filled with the bones and carcasses of many generations, 
were the chosen site for these frightful exhibitions. Like 
the unnatural gayety that reigned in the same city 
when the guillotine had filled every family with terror 
or grief, they were but an abnormal development of the 
sentiment of despair. People danced the Dance of 
Death, because life had lost its charm. Life had lost its 
security in the two most powerful nations of the time. 
England was shaken with contending factions, and 
France exhausted and hopeless of restoration. The 
peasantry in both were trampled on without re- 
morse. Jack Cade led up his famishing thou- 
sands to lay their sufferings before the throne. They 
asked for nothing but a slight relaxation of the burdens 



UNSETTLED STATE OF EUROPE. 375 

that oppressed them, and were condemned without 
mercy to the sword and gallows. The French " Jacques 
Bonhomme" was even in a worse condition. There was 
no controlling power on the throne to guard him from 
the tyrannies of a hundred petty superiors. The Church 
of his country was as much conquered by the Church 
of England as its soil by the English arms. A cardinal, 
bloated and bloody, dominated both London and Paris, 
and sent his commands from the Palace at Winchester, 
which were obeyed by both nations. And all this on 
the very eve of the introduction of the per- 
fected printing-press, the birth of Luther, and 
iM9 ^ ne discovery of America ! From the beginning 
of the century till government became assured 
by the accession of Henry YII. and Louis XL, the whole 
of Europe was unsettled and apparently on the verge 
of dissolution. In the absence of the controlling power 
of the Sovereign, each little baron asserted his own 
right and privileges, and aimed perhaps at the restora- 
tion of his feudal independence, when the spirit of feu- 
dalism had passed away. The nobility, even if it had 
been united, was not now numerous enough to present 
a ruling body to the State. It became despised as soon 
as it was seen to be powerless ; and at last, in sheer ex- 
haustion, the people, the churches, and the peerage of 
the two proudest nations in the world lay down help- 
less and unresisting at the footstool of the only authority 
likely to protect them from each other or themselves. 
When we think of the fifteenth century, let us remember 
it as the period when mankind grew tired of the esta- 
blishments of all former ages, when feudalism resigned 
its sword into the hands of monarchy, and when the 
last days of the expiring state of society were distin- 
guished by the withdrawal of the death-grasp by France 
and England from each other's throats, and the esta- 



3 ?6 FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 

blishment of respectful if not friendly sentiments be- 
tween them. By the year 1451, there was not one of 
all the conquests of the Edwards and Henrys left to the 
English except Calais. If that miserable relic had also 
been restored, it would have prevented many a heart- 
burning between the nations, and advanced, perhaps by 
centuries, the happy time when each can look across 
the narrow channel which divides them without a wish 
save for the glory and prosperity of the other. 

It is like going back to the time of the Crusades to 
turn our eyes from the end of this century to the 
beginning, so great and essential is the change that has 
taken place. Yet it is necessary, having given the 
general view of the condition of affairs, to descend to 
certain particulars by which the progress of the history 
may be more vividly denned. And of these the princi- 
pal are the battle of Agincourt, the relief of Orleans, 
the invention of Guttenberg, and the achievement of 
Columbus. These are fixed on, not for their own in- 
trinsic merits, but for the great results they produced. 
Agincourt unfeudalized France ; Joan of Arc restored 
man's faith in human virtue and divine superintendence; 
printing preserved forever the conquests of the human 
intellect; and the discovery of America opened a new 
world to the energies of mankind. 

We must return to the state of France when the Duke 
of Orleans was so treacherously slain by the ferocious 
Duke of Burgundy in 1407. For a time the crime was 
successful in establishing the murderer's power, and the 
Burgundians were strengthened by obtaining the custody 
of the imbecile king, Charles the Sixth, and the support 
of his infamous consort, Isabeau of Bavaria. But author- 
ity so obtained could not be kept without plunging into 
greater excesses. So the populace were let loose, and 
no man's life was safe. In self-defence — burning with 



CONDITION OF FRANCE. 877 

hatred of the slayer of his son-in-law and betrayer of 
his country — the Count of Armagnac denounced the 

dominant party. Burgundy threw himself into 
' the arms of England, and was only outbidden 
in his offers of submission by the Armagnacs in the fol- 
lowing year. Each party in turn promised to support 
the English king in all his claims, and before he set foot 
in France he already found himself in possession of the 

kinp-dom. Many strong places in the South 

A.D. 1413. to ii, 

were surrendered to him as pledges of the 
fidelity of his supporters. The whole land was the prey 
of faction and party hate. The Church had repudiated 
both Pope and Council; the towns were in insurrection 
in every street ; and Henry the Fifth was only twenty- 
six years of age, full of courage and ambition, supported 
by the love and gratitude of the national Church, and 
anxious to glorify the- usurpation of his family by a re- 
storation of the triumphs of Cressy and Poictiers. He 
therefore sent an embassy to France, demanding his re- 
cognition by all the States as king, though he modestly 
waived the royal title till its present holder should be 
no more. He declared also that he would not be content 
without the hand of Catharine, the French king's daugh- 
ter, with Normandy and other counties for her dowry; 
and when these reasonable conditions, as he had antici- 
pated, were rejected, and all his preparations were 
completed, he threw off the mask of negotiation, and 
sailed from Southampton with an army of six thousand 
men-at-arms and twenty-four thousand archers. A 
beautiful sight it must have been that day in Septem- 
ber, 1415, when the enormous convoy sailed or rowed 
down the placid Southampton water. Sails of various 
colours, and streamers waving from every mast, must 
have given it the appearance of an immense regatta; 
and while all France was on the watch for the point of 

32* 



378 FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 

attack, and Calais was universally regarded as the 
natural landing-place for an English army, the great 
flotilla pursued its course past the Isle of Wight, and 
struck out for the opposite coast, filling up the mouth 
of the Seine with innumerable vessels, and casting 
anchor off the town of Harfleur. Prayers for its suc- 
cess ascended from every parish in England; for the 
clergy looked on the youthful king as their champion 
against all their enemies, — against the Pope, who claimed 
their tithes, against the itinerant monks, who denied 
and resisted their authority, and against the nobles, 
who envied them their wealth and territories. And no 
wonder; for at this time the ecclesiastical possessions 
included more than the half of England. Of fifty-three 
thousand knightly holdings on the national register, 
twenty-eight thousand belonged to mother Church ! 
Prayers also for its success were uttered in the work- 
shops and markets. People were tired of the long in- 
action of Richard the Second's time, and longed for the 
stirring incidents they had heard their fathers speak of 
when the Black Prince was making the "Mounseers" 
fly. For by this time a stout feeling of mutual hatred 
had given vigour to the quarrel between the nations. 
Parliament had voted unexampled supplies, and " all the 
youth of England was afire." 

Meantime the siege of Harfleur dragged its slow 
length along. Succours were expected by the gallant 
garrison, but succour never came. Proclamations had 
indeed been issued, summoning the ban and arriere ban 
of France, and knights were assembling from all quar- 
ters to take part in the unavoidable engagement. But 
the counsels at head-quarters were divided. The masses 
of the people were not hearty in the cause, and the 
men of Harfleur, at the end of the fifth week of their 
resistance, sent to say the}' would surrender "if they 



CAPTURE OF HARFLEUR. *>>> 

were not relieved by a great army in two days." " Take 
four," said Henry, wishing nothing more than a decisive 
action under the very walls. But the time rapidly 
passed, and Harneur was once more an English town. 
Henry might look round and triumph in the possession 
of streets and houses; but that was all, for his usual 
barbarity had banished the inhabitants. The richer 
citizens were put to ransom; all the rest were driven 
from the place, — not quite naked, nor quite penniless, 
for one petticoat was left to each woman, and one 
farthing in ready money. Generosity to the vulgar 
vanquished was not yet understood, either as a Chris- 
tian duty or a stroke of policy. But courage, not un- 
mixed with braggadocio, was still the character of the 
time. The English had lost many men from sickness 
during the siege. ]STo blow had been boldly struck in 
open field, and a war without a battle, however success- 
ful in its results, would have been thought no better 
than a tournament. All the remaining chivalry of 
France was now collected under its chiefs and princes, 
and Henry determined to try what mettle they were of. 
He published a proclamation that he and his English 
would march across the country from Harfleur to Calais 
in spite of all opposition; and, as the expedition would 
occupy eight days at least, he felt sure that some attempt 
would be made to revenge so cutting an insult. He 
might easily have sent his forces, in detachments, by 
sea, for there was not a French flag upon all the Channel; 
but trumpets were sounded one day, swords drawn, 
cheers no doubt heartily uttered, by an enthusiastic 
array of fifteen thousand men, and the dangerous march 
began. It was the month of October, the time of the 
vintage : there was plenty of wine ; and a French author 
makes the characteristic remark, "with plenty of wine 
the English soldier could go to the end of the world." 



380 FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 

When the English soldier, on this occasion, had got 
through the eight days' provisions with which he started, 
instead of finding himself at Calais, he was only ad- 
vanced as far as Amiens, with the worst part of the 
journey before him. The fords of the Somme were 
said to be guarded ; spies came over in the disguise of 
deserters, and told the king that all the land was up in 
arms, that the princes were all united, and that two 
hundred thousand men were hemming them hopelessly 
round. In the midst of these bad news, however, a ray 
of light broke in. A villager pointed out a marsh, by 
crossing which they could reach a ford in the stream. 
They traversed the marsh without hesitation, waded 
with difficulty through morass and water, and, behold ! 
they were safe on the other side. The road was now 
clear, they thought, for Calais; and they pushed cheerily 
on. But, more dangerous than the marsh, more im- 
passable than the river, the vast army of France blocked 
up their way. Closing across a narrow valley which 
lay between the castle of Agincourt and the village of 
Tramecourt, sixty thousand knights, gentlemen, and 
men-at-arms stood like a wall of steel. There were all 
the great names there of all the provinces, — Dukes of 
Lorraine, and Bar, and Bourbon, Princes of Orleans 
and Berri, and many more. Henry by this time had 
bat twelve thousand men. He found he had miscalcu- 
lated his movements, and was unwilling to sacrifice his 
army to the point of honour. He offered to resign the title 
of King of France and to surrender his recent conquest 
at Harneur. But the princes were resolved not to nego- 
tiate, but to revenge. Henry then said to the prisoners 
he was leading in his train, "Gentlemen, go till this 
affair is settled. If your captors survive, present your- 
selves at Calais." His forces were soon arranged. 
Archers had ceased to be the mere appendages to a line 



AGINCOUKT. 381 

of battle : they now constituted almost all the English 
army. All the night before they had been busy in pre- 
paration. They had furbished up their arms, and put 
new cords to their bows, and sharpened the stakes they 
carried to ward off the attack of cavalry. At early 
dawn they had confessed to the priest; and all the time 
no noise had been heard. Henry had ordered silence 
throughout the camp on pain of the severest penal ties, 
••u* — loss of his horse to a gentleman, and of his 

A.D. 1415. to ' 

right ear to a common soldier. The 23d of Oc- 
tober was the great, the important clay. Henry put a 
noble helmet on his head, surmounted by a golden 
crown, sprang on his little gray hackney, encouraged 
his men with a few manly words, reminding them of Old 
England and how constantly they had conquered the 
Erench, and led them to a field where the grass was 
still green, and which the rains had not converted into 
mud; for the weather had long been unpropitious. 
And here the heroic little army expected the attack. 
But the enemy were in no condition to make an ad- 
vance. Seated all night on their enormous war-horses, 
the heavy-armed cavaliers had sunk the unfortunate 
animals up to their knees in the adhesive soil. Old 
Thomas of Erpingham, seeing the decisive moment, 
completed the marshalling of the English as soon as 
possible, and, throwing his baton in the air, cried, 
" Now, Strike !" A great hurrah was the answer to this 
order; but still the Erench line continued unmoved. 
If it had been turned into stone it could not have been 
more inactive. Banged thirty-two deep, and fixed to 
the spot they stood on, buried up in armour, and 
crowded in the narrow space, the knights could offer 
no resistance to the attack of their nimble and lightly- 
armed foes. A flight of ten thousand arrows poured 
upon the vast mass, and saddles became empty with- 



382 FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 

out a blow. There came, indeed, two great charges of 
horse from the flank of the French array; but the in- 
evitable shaft found entrance through their coats of 
mail, and very few survived. Of these the greater 
part rushed, blind and wounded, back among their 
own men, crashing upon the still spell-bound line and 
throwing it into inextricable confusion. Horse and man 
rolled over in the dirt, struggling and shrieking in an 
undistinguishable mass. Meanwhile the archers, throw- 
ing aside their stakes and seizing the hatchets hanging 
round their necks, advanced at a run, — poured blows 
without cessation on casque and shield, completing the 
destruction among the crowded multitudes which their 
own disorder had begun -, and, as the same cause which 
hindered their advance prevented their retreat, they 
sat the hopeless victims of a false position, and were 
slaughtered without an attempt made to resist or fly. 
The fate of the second line was nearly the same. Henry, 
forcing his w^y with sword and axe through the living- 
barrier of horse and cavalier, led his compact array to 
the glittering body beyond. There the melee became 
more animated, and prowess was shown upon either 
side. But the rear-guard, warned by previous expe- 
rience, took flight before the middle lines were pierced, 
and Henry saw himself victor with very trifling loss, 
and only encumbered with the number of the slain, and 
still more with the multitude of prisoners. Almost all 
the surviving noblemen had surrendered their swords. 
They knew too well tjie fate of wounded or disarmed 
gentlemen even among their countrymen, and trusted 
rather to the generosity of the conqueror than the 
mercy of their own people. Alas that we must again 
confess that Henry was ignorant of the name of gene- 
rosity ! Alarmed for a moment at the threatening as- 
pect of some of the fugitives who had resumed their 



SLAUGHTER OF THE FRENCH NOBILITY. 383 

ranks, he gave the pitiless word that every prisoner was 
to be slain. Not a soldier would lift his hand against 
his captive, — from the double motive of tenderness and 
cupidity. To tell an "archer good" to murder a great 
baron, the captive of his bow and spear, was to tell him 
to resign a ransom which would make him rich for life. 
But Henry was not to be balked. He appointed two 
hundred men to be executioners of his command; and 
thousands of the young and gay were slaughtered in cold 
blood. Was it hideous policy which thus led Henry to 
weaken his enemy's cause by diminishing the number 
of its knightly defenders, or was it really the result of 
the fear of being overcome ? Whichever it was, the 
effect was the same. Ten thousand of the gentlemen of 
France were the sufferers on that day, — a whole gene- 
ration of the rich and high-born swept away at one 
blow ! It would have taken a long time in the course 
of nature to supply their place; but nature was not 
allowed to have her way. Wars and dissensions inter- 
fered with her restorative efforts. Six-and-thirty years 
were yet to be spent in mutual destruction, or in strug- 
gles against the English name; and when France was 
again left free from foreign occupation, when French 
chivalry again wished to assume the chief rule in human 
affairs, it was found that chivalry was out of place ; a 
new state of things had arisen in Europe ; the greatest 
exploit which had been known in their national annals 
had been performed by a woman; and knighthood had 
so lost its manliness that, when prosperity and popula- 
tion had again made France a powerful kingdom, the 
silk-clad courtiers of an un warlike monarch thought it 
good taste to sneer at the relief of Orleans and the 
mission of Joan of Arc ! 

Six years after Agincourt, the English conqueror and 
the wretched phantom of kingship called Charles the 



384 FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 

,.„ Sixth descended to their graves. Military 

A.D. 1421. , to J 

honour and patriotism seemed utterly at an end 
among the French population, and our Henry the Sixth, 
the son of the man of Agincourt, succeeded in the great 
object of English ambition and was recognised from 
the Channel to the Loire as King of France. In the 
Southern provinces a spark of the old French gallantry 
was still unextinguished, but it showed itself in the gay 
unconcern with which the Dauphin, now Charles the 
Seventh, bore all the reverses of fortune, and consoled 
himself for the loss of the noblest crown in Europe by 
the enjoyments of love and festivity. Perhaps he saw 
that the whirligig of time would bring about its re- 
venges, and that the curse of envious faction would vex 
the councils of the conquerors as it had ruined the 
fortunes of the subdued. The warriors of Henry still 
remained, but, without the controlling hand, they could 
direct their efforts to no common object. The uncles of 
the youthful king speedily quarrelled. The gallant 
Bedford was opposed by the treacherous Glo'ster, and 
both were dominated and supplanted by the haughty 
prelate, the Cardinal Bishop of Winchester. Offence was 
soon taken at the presumption of the English soldiery. 
Eeligious animosities supervened. The Churches of 
England and France had both made successful endeavours 
to establish a considerable amount of national indepen- 
dence, and the French bishops, who had withdrawn 
themselves from the absolutism of Rome, were little in- 
clined to become subordinate to Winchester and Canter- 
bury. A court gradually gathered round the Dauphin, 
which inspired him with more manly thoughts. His 
feasts and tournaments were suspended, and, with his 
hand on the hilt of his sword, he watched the proceed- 
ings of the English. These proceedings were uniformly 
successful when restricted to the operations of war. 



SIEGE OF ORLEANS. 385 

They defeated the men of Gascony and the reinforce- 
ments sent over by the Scotch. They held a firm grasp 
of Paris and all the strong places of the North, and 
cast down the gauntlet to the rest of France by laying 
-,, nn siege to the beautiful city of Orleans in the 

a.d. 1428. ° J 

winter of 1428. Once in possession of the Loire, 
they would be able at their leisure to extend their con- 
quests southward; and all the loyal throughout the 
country took up the challenge and resolved on the 
defence of the beleaguered town. The English must have 
begun by this time to despise their enemy 3 for, in spite 
of the greatness of the stake, they undertook the siege 
with a force of less than three thousand men. To make 
up for the deficiency in numbers, they raised twelve 
large bastions all round the walls, exhausting the troops 
by the labour and finding it impossible to garrison 
them adequately when they were finished. It seems 
that Sebastopol was not the first occasion on which our 
soldiers were overworked. To surround a city of several 
thousand inhabitants, strongly garrisoned, and with an 
open country at its back for the supply of provisions, 
would have required a large and well-directed force. 
But the moral effects of Agincourt, and even of Cressy 
and Poictiers, were not yet obliterated. Public spirit 
was dead, and very few entertained a hope of saving 
the doomed place. Statesmen, politicians, and warriors, 
all calculated the chances of success and decided against 
the cause of France. But in the true heart of the 
common people far better feelings survived. They were 
neither statesmen, nor politicians, nor warriors; but 
they were loyal and devoted Frenchmen, and put their 
trust in God. 

A peasant-girl, eighteen years of age, born and bred 
in a little village called Domremy, in Lorraine, was 
famous for her religious faith and simplicity of charac- 
z 33 



386 FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 

ter. Her name was Joan d'Arc, — a dreamy enthusiast, 
believing with full heart all the legends of saints and 
miracles with which the neighbourhood was full. She 
rested, also, with a sort of romantic interest on the per- 
sonal fortunes of the young discrowned king, who had 
been unjustly excluded by foreigners from his rights 
and was now about to lose the best of his remaining 
possessions. She walked in the woods and heard voices 
telling her to be up and doing. She went to pray in the 
dim old church, and had glorious visions of angels who 
smiled upon her. One time she saw a presence with a 
countenance like the sun, and wings upon his shoulders, 
who said, " Go, Joan, to the help of the King of France." 
But she answered, " My lord, I cannot ride, nor com- 
mand men-at-arms." The voice replied, "Go to M. de 
Baudricourt at Yaucouleurs : he will take thee to the 
king. Saint Catharine and Saint Marguerite will come 
to thy assistance." There was no voluntary deception 
here. The girl lived in a world of her own, and peopled 
it out of the fulness of her heart. She went to Yaucou- 
leurs : she saw M. de Baudricourt. He took her to 
Poictiers, where the Dauphin resided, and when she 
was led into the glittering ring an attempt was made 
to deceive her by representing another as the prince ; 
but she went straight up to the Dauphin and said to 
him, " Gentle Dauphin, my name is Joan the Maid. The 
King of Heaven sends to you, through me, that you 
shall be anointed and crowned at Eheims, and you shall 
be lieutenant of the King of Heaven, who is King of 
France." All the court was moved, — the more pure- 
minded, with sympathy for the girl, the more expe- 
rienced, with the use that might be made of her enthu- 
siasm to rouse the nation. Both parties conspired to 
aid Joan in her design ; and, clothed in white armour, 
mounted on a war-horse, holding the banner of France 



JOAN OF ARC. 387 

in her hand, and waited on by knights and pages, she 
set forth on her way to Orleans. It was like a religious 
procession all the way. She prayed at all the shrines, 
and was blest by the clergy, and held on her path un- 
dismayed with all the dangers that occurred at every 
step. At length, on the 30th of April, she made her 
entry into Orleans. Her corning had long been ex- 
pected; and, now that it had really happened, people 
looked back at the difficulties of the route and thought 
the whole march a miracle. Meantime Joan knelt and 
gave thanks in the great church, and the true defence 
of Orleans began. Into the hard-pressed city had 
gathered all the surviving chivalry of France, — Dunois, 
the bastard of Orleans, La Hire, Saintrailles, rough and 
dissolute soldiers, yet all held in awe by the purity and 
innocence of the Maid. With Joan at the head of the 
column of assault, the English intrenchments fell one 
after another. In spite of wounds and hardships, the 
peasant-girl pushed fearlessly on ; the knights and gen- 
tlemen could not decline to follow where she led the 
way ; and ten days after her arrival old Talbot and Fal- 
staff gathered up the fragments of their troops and 
made a precipitate retreat from the scene of their dis- 
comfiture. Eut there was not yet rest for the dreamer 
of Domremy. She hurried off to the Dauphin. " G-entle 
Dauphin," she said, " till you are crowned with the old 
crown and bedewed with the holy oil, you can never 
be King of France. Come with me to Eheims. There 
shall no enemy hurt you on the way." The country 
through which they had to pass was bristling with 
English castles and swarming with wandering troops. 
Yet the counsel which appeared so hardy was in fact 
the wisest that could be given. The faith in the sanc- 
tity of coronations was still strong. Whoever was first 
crowned would in the eye of faith be true king. Win- 



3 88 FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 

Chester was bringing over the English claimant. All 
France would be startled at the news that the de- 
scendant of St. Louis was beforehand with his rival; 
and the march was successfully made. " Gentle king," 
July 17 said Joan, kneeling after the ceremony, and 
1429 - calling him for the first time King, — " Gentle 
King, Orleans is saved, the true king is crowned. My 
task is done. Farewell." But they would not let her 
leave them so soon. The people crowded round her and 
blest her wherever she appeared. " Oh, the good people 
of Eheims \" she cried : " when I die I should like to be 
buried here." " When do you think you shall die ?" in- 
quired the archbishop, — perhaps with a sneer upon his 
lips. "That I know not," she replied: "whenever it 
pleases God. But, for my own part, I wish to go back 
and keep the sheep with my sister and brothers. They 
will be so glad to see me again !" But this was not 
to be. 

If Talbot and Suffolk had been foiled and vanquished 
by Dunois and La Hire, they would have accepted their 
defeat as one of the mischances of war. A knightly 
hand ennobles the blow it gives. But to be humbled by 
a woman, a peasant, a prophetess, an impostor, — this 
was too much for the proud stomachs of our steel-clad 
countrymen. But far worse was it in the eyes of our 
stole-clad ecclesiastics. Apparitions of saints and angels 
vouchsafed to the recalcitrant Church of France ! — 
voices heard from heaven denouncing the claims of the 
English king ! — visible glories hanging round the head 
of a simple shepherdess ! It was evident to every clergy- 
man and monk and bishop in England that the woman 
was a witch or a deceiver. And almost all the clergy- 
men in France thought the same; and after a while, 
when the exploit was looked back upon with calmness, 
almost all the soldiers on both sides were of the same 



JOAN SENTENCED FOR HERESY. 389 

opinion. Nobody could believe in the exaltation of a 
pure and enthusiastic mind, making its own vision s, and 
performing its own miracles, without a tincture of deceit. 
It was easier and more orthodox to believe in the lique- 
faction of the holy oil and the wonders wrought by the 
bones of St. Denis : so, with a nearly universal assent 
of both the parties, the humbled English and delivered 
French, the most heroic and most feminine of women 
was handed over to the Church tribunals, and Joan's 
fate was sealed. Unmanly priests, whose law prevented 
them from having wives, unloving bishops, whose law 
prevented them from having daughters, — how were 
they to judge of the loving heart and trusting tender- 
ness of a girl not twenty years of age, standing before 
them, with modesty not shown in blushes but in un- 
abated simplicity of behaviour, telling the tale of all 
her actions as if she were pouring it into the ears of 
father and mother in her own old cottage at home, un- 
conscious, or at least regardless, of scowling looks, and 
misleading questions, directed to her by those predeter- 
mined murderers ? No one tried to save her. Charles 
the Seventh, with the oil of Bheims scarcely dried upon 
his head, made no attempt to get her from the hands of 
her enemies. The process took place at Eouen. Magic 
and heresy were the crimes laid to her charge \ and as 
generosity was magic in the eyes of those narrow-souled 
inquisitors, and trust in G-od was heresy, there was no 
defence possible. Her whole life was a confession. 
First, she was condemned to perpetual imprisonment, 
and to resume the dress of her sex. Then she was ex- 
posed to every obloquy and insult which hatred and 
superstition could pour upon her. A gallant " Lord" 
accompanied the Count de Ligny in a visit to her cell. 
She was chained to a plank by both feet, and kept in 
this attitude night and day. The noble Englishman did 

33* 



890 



FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 



honour to his rank and country. When Joan said, " I 
know the English will procure my death, in hopes of 
getting the realm of France; but they could not do it, 
no, if they had a hundred thousand Goddams more than 
they have to-day ;" the gallant visitor was so enraged 
by those depreciating remarks, and perhaps at the nick- 
name thus early indicative of the national oath, that he 
drew his dagger, and would have struck her, if he had 
not been hindered by Lord Warwick. Another gentle- 
man, on being admitted to her prison, insulted her by 
the grossness of his behaviour, and then overwhelmed 
her with blows. It was time for Joan to escape her tor- 
mentors. She put on once more the male apparel 
which she had thrown off, and sentence of death was 
passed. On the 30th of May, 1431, in the old fishmarket 
of Rouen, the great crime was consummated. The 
flames mounted very slowly ; and when at last they en- 
veloped her from the crowd, she was still heard calling 
mtnH on Jesus, and declaring, " The voices I heard 

A.D. 1431. ; ° 

were of God ! — the voices I heard were of 
God !" The age of chivalry was indeed past, and the 
age of Church-domination was also about to expire. 
The peasant-girl of Domremy wrote the dishonoured 
epitaph of the first in the flame of Eouen, and a citizen 
of Mentz was about to give the other its death-blow 
with the printing-press. 

This is one of the inventions apparently unimportant, 
by which incalculable results have been produced. At 
first it was intended merely to simplify the process of 
copying the books which were already well known. 
And, if we may trust some of the stories told of the 
earliest specimens of the art, we shall see that there 
was some slight portion of dishonesty mingled with the 
talent of the Fathers of printing. These were Gutten- 
berg of Mentz, and his apprentice or partner Faust. The 



PRINTING. 391 

first of their productions was a Latin Bible; and the 

„ irr letters of this impression were such an exact 
a.d. 1455. r 

imitation of the works of the amanuensis that 
they passed it off as an exquisite specimen of the copyist's 
art. Faust sold a copy to the King of France for seven 
hundred crowns, and another to the Archbishop of Paris 
for four hundred. The prelate, enchanted with his bar- 
gain, (for the usual price was several hundred crowns 
above what he had given,) showed it in triumph to the 
king. The king compared the two, and was filled with 
astonishment. They were identical in every stroke and 
dot. How was it possible for any two scribes, or even 
for the same scribe, to produce so undeniable a fac- 
simile of his work ? The capital letters of the edition 
were of red ink. They inquired still further, and found 
that many other copies had been sold, all precisely alike 
in form and pressure. They came to the conclusion that 
Faust was a wizard and had sold himself to the devil, 
and that the initials were of blood. The Church and 
State, in this case united in the persons of king and arch- 
bishop, had the magician apprehended. To save himself 
from the flames, the unhappy Faust had to confess the 
deceit, and also to discover the secret of the art. The 
whole mystery consisted in cutting letters upon movable 
metal types, and, after rubbing them with ink when 
they were correctly set, imprinting them upon paper 
by means of a screw. A simple expedient, as it ap- 
peared to everybody when the secret was spread abroad; 
for there had been seals stamping impressions on wax 
for many generations. Medals and coins had been 
poured forth from the dies of every nation from the 
dawn of history. In England, playing-cards had been 
produced for several years, with the figures impressed 
on them from wooden blocks ; and in 1423 a stamped 
book, with wood engravings, had made its appearance, 



392 



FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 



which now, with many treasures of typography, is in 
the library of Lord Spencer. Even in Nineveh, we 
learn from recent discovery, the dried bricks, while in a 
soft state, had been stamped with those curious-looking 
inscriptions, by a board in which the unsightly letters 
were set in high relief. Wooden letters had also long 
been known ; and yet it was not till 1440 that Gutten- 
berg bethought him of the process of printing, and only 
after ten or twelve years' labour that he brought his ex- 
periments to perfection and with one crush of the com- 
pleted press opened new hopes and prospects to the 
whole family of mankind. But things apparently un- 
connected are brought together for good when the great 
turning-points of human history are attained. There are 
always pebbles of the brook within reach when the 
warrior-shepherd has taken the sling in his hand. 
Shortly before the invention of printing, a discovery 
was made without which Guttenberg's skill would have 
been of no avail. This was the applicability of linen 
rags to the manufacture of paper. Parchment, and pre- 
paration s of straw and papyrus, had sufficed for the 
transcriber and author of those unliterary times, but 
would have been inadequate to supply the demand of 
the new process; and therefore we may say that, as 
gunpowder was essential to the use of artillery, and 
steam-power for the railway-train, linen paper was in- 
dispensable to the development of the press. And that 
development was rapid beyond all imagination. In the 
remaining portion of the century, eight thousand five 
hundred and nine books were published, of which the 
English Caxton and his followers supplied one hundred 
and forty-two, — a small contribution in actual numbers, 
but valuable for the insight it gives us into the favourite 
literature of the time. Among those volumes there are 



TIIINTING. 398 

"Songs of war for gallant knight, 
Lays of love for lady bright ;" 

" The Tale of Troy divine/' for scholars ; " Tullie, of old 
age/' and " of Friendship/' and " Yirgil's iEneid," for the 
classical; "Lives of Our Ladie and divers Saints/' for 
the religious ; and " The Consolation of Boethius," for 
the afflicted. But several editions prove the popularity 
of the Father of English poetry; and we find the " Tales 
of Cauntyrburrie/' and the "Book of Fame/' and 
tt Troylus and Cresyde, made by Geoffrey Chaucer/' the 
great and fitting representatives of the native English 
muse. 

We ought to remember, in judging of the paucity of 
books produced in England, that the Wars of the Eoses 
broke out at the very time when G-uttenberg's labours 
began. In such a season of struggle and unrest as the 
thirty years of civil strife — for though Mr. Knight, in 
his very interesting sketch of this date,* has shown that 
the period of actual and open war was very short, the 
state of uneasiness and expectation must have endured 
the whole time — there was small encouragement to the 
peaceful triumphs of art or literature. And, moreover, 
the pride of station was revolted by the prospect of the 
spread of information among the classes to whom it had 
not yet reached. The noble could afford to acknowledge 
his inferiority in learning and research to the priest or 
monk, for it was their trade to be wise and learned, and 
their scholarship was even considered a badge of the 
lowness of their birth, which had given them the primer 
and psalter instead of the horse and sword. But those 
high-hearted cavaliers could ill brook the notion of edu- 
cated clowns and peasants. And, strange to say, the 
sentiment was shared and exaggerated by the peasants 

* Popular History — Henry VI. 



394 FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 

and clowns themselves. Jack Cade is represented, by 
an anachronism of date but with perfect truth of cha- 
racter, as profoundly irritated at the invention of print- 
ing, and the building of a paper-mill, and the introduc- 
tion of such heathenish words as nominatives and ad- 
verbs : so that the press began its career opposed by the 
two greatest parties of the State. Yet truth is mighty 
and will prevail. No nobility in Europe gives such con- 
tributions to the general stock of high and healthy 
thought as the descendants of the men of Towton and 
Bosworth, and no peasantry values more deeply, or would 
defend more gallantly, the gifts poured upon it by a free 
and sympathizing press. Warwick the King-maker, if 
he had lived just now, would have made speeches in 
Parliament and had them reported in the Times, and 
Jack Cade would have been sent to the reformatory and 
taught to read and write. 

But, with the peerages of Europe greatly thinned, 
with mounted feudalism overthrown, with the press re- 
joicing as a giant to run its course, something also was 
needed in order to make a wider theatre for the intro- 
duction of the new life of men. Another world lay 
beyond the great waters of the Atlantic. Whispers had 
been going round the circle of earnest inquirers, which 
gradually grew louder and louder till they reached the 
ears of kings, that great things lay hidden in the awful 
and mysterious solitudes of the ocean ; that westward, 
to balance the preponderance of our used-up continent, 
must be solid land, equal in weight and size, so that the 
uninterrupted waters would conduct the adventurous 
mariner to the farther India by a nearer route than 
, . Bartholomew Diaz, the Portuguese, had just dis- 

a.d. 148V. . & > J 

covered. This man sailed to the southern ex- 
tremity of Africa, passed round to the east without 
being aware of his achievement, and penetrated as far 



COLUMBUS. 395 

as Lagoa Bay. But the crew became discontented, and 
the navigator retraced his steps. Alarmed at the com- 
motion of the vast waves of the Southern Ocean pour- 
ing its floods against the Table Mountain, he had retired 
from further research, and called the southern point of 
his pilgrimage the Cape of Storms. It is now known to 
us by a happier augury as the Cape of Good Hope. But, 
whether perpetually haunted by tempests or not, the 
truth was discovered that the land ceased at that pro- 
montory and left an unexplored sea beyond. This was 
cherished in many a heart; for in this century maritime 
discovery kept pace with the other triumphs of mental 
power. Wherever ship could swim man could venture. 
The Azores had been discovered in 1439 and colonized 
by the Portuguese in 1440. Already in possession of 
Cape Yerd, Madeira, and the Canaries, Portugal looked 
forward to greater discoveries, for these were the nurse- 
ries of gallant and skilful mariners. But the glory was 
left for another nation, — though, by a strange caprice of 
fortune, the chance of it had been offered to nearly all. 

The life of Columbus is more wonderful than a ro- 
mance. He hawked about his notion of the way to 
India at all the courts of Europe. By birth a Genoese, 
he considered the great ocean the patrimony of any 
person able to seize it. When his services, therefore, 
were rejected by his own country, he offered them suc- 
cessively to Portugal, to Spain, and to England. Henry 
the Seventh was inclined to venture a small sum in the 
lottery of chances j but, while still in negotiation with 
the brother of Columbus, the Spanish monarchs, Ferdi- 
nand and Isabella, closed with the navigator's terms, 
and on the 3d of August, 1492, the squadron of discovery, 
consisting of a vessel of some size, and two small pin- 
naces, with a crew at most of a hundred persons in all 
the three, sailed from the port of Palos, in Andalusia. 



396 FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 

Three weeks' constant progress to the westward took 
them far beyond all previous navigation. The men be- 
came disheartened, discontented, and finally rebellious. 
Against all, Columbus bore up with the self-relying 
energy of a great mind, but was driven to the compro- 
mise of promising, if they confided in him for three days 
longer, he would return, if the object of his voyage was 
yet unattained. But by this time his sagacious obser- 
vation had assured him of success. Strange appear- 
ances began to be perceived from the ship's decks. A 
carved piece of wood floated past, then a reed newly 
cut, and, best sign of all, a branch with red berries still 
fresh. "From all these symptoms, Columbus was so 
confident of being near land, that on the evening of 
the 11th of October, after public prayers for success, he 
ordered the sails to be furled, and the ships to lie to, 
keeping strict watch, lest they should be driven ashore 
in the night. During this interval of suspense and ex- 
pectation no man shut his eyes : all kept upon deck, 
gazing intently towards that quarter where they ex- 
pected to discover the land, which had been so long the 
object of their wishes. About two hours before mid- 
night, Columbus, standing on the forecastle, observed a 
light at a distance, and privately pointed it out to Pedro 
G-uttierez, a page of the queen's wardrobe. Guttierez 
perceiving it, and calling to Salcedo, comptroller of the 
fleet, all three saw it in motion, as if it were carried 
from place to place. A little after midnight the joyful 
sound of '■Land I landV was heard from the Pinta, 
which kept always ahead of the other ships. But, 
having been so often deceived by fallacious appearances, 
every man was now become slow of belief, and waited 
in all the anguish of uncertainty and impatience for the 
return of day. As soon as morning dawned, all doubts 
and fears were dispelled. From every ship an island 



DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 397 

was seen about two leagues to the north, whoso flat and 
verdant fields, well stored with wood, and watered with 
many rivulets, presented the aspect of a delightful 
country. The crew of the Pinta instantly began the 
Te Deum as a hymn of thanksgiving to God, and were 
joined by those of the other ships, with tears of joy 
and transports of congratulation. This office of grati- 
tude to Heaven was followed by an act of justice to 
their commander. They threw themselves at the feet 
of Columbus, with feelings of self-condemnation mingled 
with reverence. They implored him to pardon their 
ignorance, incredulity, and insolence, which had created 
him so much unceasing disquiet and had so often ob- 
structed the prosecution of his well-concerted plan ; and, 
passing in the warmth of their admiration from one 
extreme to another, they now pronounced the man 
whom they had so lately reviled and threatened to be a 
person inspired by Heaven with sagacity and fortitude 
more than human, in order to accomplish a design so 
far beyond the ideas and conception of all former ages." 
Many excellent writers have described this wondrous 
incident, but none so well as the historian of America, 
Dr. Eobertson, whose eloquent account is borrowed in 
the preceding lines. The great event occurred on Fri- 
day, the 12th of October, 1492, and the connection be- 
tween the two worlds began. The place he first landed 
at was San Salvador, one of the Bahamas ; and after 
attaching Cuba and Hispaniola to the Spanish crown, 
and going through imminent perils by land and sea, he 
achieved his glorious return to Palos on the 15th of 
March, 1493. He brought with him some of the natives 
of the different islands he had discovered, and their 
strange appearance and manners were vouchers for the 
facts he stated. The whole town, when he came into 
the harbour, was in an uproar of delight. " The bells 

34 



398 FIFTEENTH CENTURY. 

were rung, the cannon fired, Columbus was received at 
landing with royal honours, and all the people, in solemn 
procession, accompanied him and his crew to the church, 
where they returned thanks to Heaven, which had so 
wonderfully conducted, and crowned with success, a 
voyage of greater length, and of more importance, 
than had been attempted in any former age."* 



* Dr. Robertson. 



SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 



ISmperors of ^etmang- Ittngs of dFrance. 



A.D. 

Maximilian I. — (cont.) 
1519. Charles V., (1st of Spain.) 
1558. Ferdinand I. 
1564. Maximilian II. 
1576. Eodolph II. 

i&tngs of ISnglanir. 

Henry VII. — {cont) 
1509. Henry VIII. 
1547. Edward VI. 
1553. Mary. 
1558. Elizabeth. 

Htngs of Scotland 

James IV. — (cont.) 
1513. James V. 
1542. Mary. 
1567. James VI. 



A.D. 

Louis XII. — (cont.) 

1515. Francis I. 
1547. Henry II. 

1559. Francis II. 

1560. Charles IX. 
1574. Henry III. 

(The Bourbons.) 
1589. Henry IV. 

fttngs of Spauu 

1512. Ferdinand V., (the 
Catholic.) 

1516. Charles I., (Emperor of 

Germany.) 
1556. Philip II. 
1598. Philip III. 



Btsttngufsfje* Mm. 

Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, Kaffaelle, Correggio, 
Titian, (Painters,) Sir Philip Sydney, Kaleigh, Spenser, 
Shakspeare, (1564-1616,) Ariosto, Tasso, Lope de Vega, Calde- 
ron, Cervantes, Scaliger, (1484-1558,) Copernicus, (1473-1543,) 
Knox, (1505-1572,) Calvin, (1509-1564,) Beza, (1519-1605,) 
Bellarmine, (1542-1621,) Tycho Brahe, (1546-1601.) 



THE SIXTEENTH CENTUKY. 

THE REFORMATION THE JESUITS POLICY OF ELIZABETH 

In the last two years of the preceding century the 
course of maritime discovery had been accelerated by 
fresh success. To balance the glories of Columbus in 
the West, the "regions of the rising sun" had been ex- 
plored by Vasco da Grama, a Portuguese. This great 
navigator sailed back into the harbour of Lisbon on the 
16th of September, 1499, with the astonishing news that 
he had doubled the Cape of Storms, which had so alarmed 
Bartholomew Diaz, and established relations of amity 
and commerce with the vast continent of India, having 
traded with a civilized and industrious people at Calicut, 
a great city on the coast of Malabar. Under these re- 
iterated widenings of men's knowledge of the globe, 
the human mind itself expanded. Familiar names meet 
us from henceforth in the most distant quarters of the 
world. All national or domestic history becomes mixed 
up with elements hitherto unknown. The balance of 
power, which is the new constitution of the European 
States, depends on circumstances and places of the most 
heterogeneous character. • A treaty between France 
and Spain, or between England and either, is regulated 
by events occurring on the Amazon or Ganges. The 
whole world gets more closely connected than ever it 
was before, and we can look back on the proceedings of 
previous ages as filling a very narrow theatre, and regu- 
lated by very contracted interests, when compared with, 
the universal policies on which public affairs have now 
2 A 3.* 401 



402 SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 

to rest. At first, however, the great results of these 
stupendous discoveries were naturally not observed. 
Contemporaries are justly accused of magnifying the 
small affairs of life of which they are witnesses; but 
this observation does not hold good with respect to the 
really momentous incidents of human history. A man 
who saw Columbus return from his voyage, or Gutten- 
berg pulling at his press, could not rise to the contem- 
plation of the prodigious consequences of these two 
events. He thought, perhaps, a quarrel between two' 
neighbouring potentates, or a battle between France 
and Spain, the greatest incident of his time. His son 
forgot all about the quarrel; his grandson had no recol- 
lection of the battle; but widening in a still increasing 
circle, expanding into still more wonderful proportions, 
were the Discovery of America and the Art of Printing, 
— showing themselves in combinations of events and 
changes of circumstances where they were never ex- 
pected to appear, — the one threatening to overthrow 
the freedom of every State in Europe by the supremacy 
of the Spanish crown, the other in reality preventing 
the chance of that consummation by raising up the 
indomitable spirit of spiritual liberty. For there now 
came to the aid of national independence the far more 
elevating feelings of religious emancipation. Protest- 
antism was not limited in this century to denial of the 
spiritual authority of popes, but embodied itself also in 
resistance to the political ambition of kings. America 
might have enabled Charles the Fifth to conquer all 
Europe, if the Eeformation had not strengthened men's 
minds with a determination to stand up against oppres- 
sion. 

But the commencement of this century gave no inti- 
mation of its tempestuous course. The first few years 
saw the peaceable accession to the thrones of Spain and 



SPAIN. 403 

France and England of the three sovereigns whose con- 
temporaneous reigns, and also whose personal characters, 
had the most preponderating influence on the succeeding 
current of events. We have left Spain for a long time 
out of these general views of a century's condition and 
special notices of individual incidents which affected 
the condition of the world; for Spain for a long time 
lay obscurely between the ocean and the Pyrenees and 
carried on Avars and policies which were limited by its 
territorial bounds. But, if we take a hurried retro- 
spect of the last few years, we shall see that the different 
nations contained in the Peninsula had amalgamated 
into one mighty and strongly-cemented State. Ferdi- 

■,„ w nand of Ara^on, bv marriage with Isabella 
a.d. 1497. . ° . ' J 9 

of Castile, united the various nationalities 
under one homogeneous government, and by wisdom 
and- magnanimity — the wisdom being the man's and 
the magnanimity the woman's — had rendered forever 
famous the joint reign of husband and wife, had recon- 
ciled the jarring factions of their respective subjects, 
and seen with the triumphant faith of believers and the 
satisfaction of sagacious rulers the reunion of the last 
Mohammedan State to the dominion of the Cross and 
of the crown. They watched the long, slow march of 
the Moorish king and his cavaliers as they took their 
way in poverty and despair from the towers and 
meadows of Granada, which a possession of seven 
hundred years had failed to make their own. This — 
the conquest of Granada — took place in 1491 j and 1516 
saw the supreme power over all united Spain descend 
on the head of the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, 
— inheriting, along with their royal dignity, the cautious 
wisdom of the one and the wider intelligence of the 
other. In three years from that time — it will be easy 
to remember that Charles's age is the same as the cen- 



404 



SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 



tury's — he was elected to the Imperial crown, so that 
the greatest dominion ever held by one man since the 
days of Charlemagne now fell to the rule of a youth of 
nineteen years of age. Germany, the Netherlands, 
Naples, Sicily, and Spain, more than equalled the extent 
and power of Charlemagne's empire. But ere Charles 
was a year older, vaster dominions than Charlemagne 
had ever dreamt of acknowledged his royal sway; for 
„ rrt „ Montezuma, the Emperor of Mexico, whose 

a.d. 1520. ' x 

realm was without appreciable limit either in 
size or wealth, professed himself the subject and servant 
of the Spanish king. 

Henry the Eighth of England had also succeeded at 
an early age, being but eighteen in 1509, when the 
death of his father, the politic and successful founder of 
the Tudor dynasty, left him with a people silent if not 
quite satisfied, and an exchequer overflowing with what 
would now amount to ten or twelve millions of gold. 
This treasure had been accumulated by the infamous 
exactions of the late sovereign, who was aided in the 
ignoble service by two men of the names of Empson 
and Dudley. These were spies and informers, not, as 
in other climes and countries, about the religious or 
political sentiments of the people, but about their titles 
to their estates, the fines they were disposed to pay, or 
the bribes they would advance to the royal extortioner 
to avoid litigation and injustice. Henry had an admi- 
rable opportunity of showing his hatred of these prac- 
tices, and availed himself of it at once. Before he had 
been four months on the throne, Empson and Dudley 
were ignominiously hanged; and with safe conscience, 
after this sacrifice at the shrine of legality, he entered 
into possession of the pilfered store. The people ap- 
plauded the rapid decision of his character in both theso 
instances, and scarcely grudged him the money when 



FRANCE. 405 

the subordinates were given up to their revenge. They 
could not, indeed, grudge their young king any thing; 
his manners were so open and sincere, his laugh so 
ready, and his teeth so white j for we are not to forget, 
in compliment to what is facetiously called the dignity 
of history, the immense advantages a ruler gains by 
the fact of being good-looking. Nobody feels inclined 
to find fault with a lad of eighteen, if moderately en- 
dowed with health and features ; but when that lad is 
eminently handsome, rioting in strength and spirits, 
open in disposition, and, above all, a king, you need not 
wonder at the universal inclination to overlook his 
faults, to exaggerate his virtues, and even, after an 
interval of two hundred and fifty years, to hear the 
greatest tyrant of our history, and the worst man 
perhaps of his time, talked of by the ordinary title of 
Bluff King Hal. If he had been as ugly and hump- 
backed as his grand-uncle Eichard the Third, he would 
have been detested from the first. 

But in the neighbouring land of France there reigned 
at the same time a prince almost as handsome as Henry, 
and nearly as popular with his people, with as little 
real cause. In 1515, Francis the First was twenty 
years of age, a perfect specimen of manly strength, — 
accomplished in all knightly exercises, — generous and 
magnificent in his intercourse with his nobility, — and 
the greatest roue and debauchee in all the kingdom of 
France. Here, then, at the beginning of the age we 
have now to examine, were the three mightiest sove- 
reigns of Europe, all arriving at their crowns before at- 
taining their majority; and with so many years before 
them, and such powerful nations obeying their com- 
mands, great prospects for good or evil were opening on 
the world. But in the early years of the century no 
human eye perceived in what direction the future was 



406 



SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 



going to pursue its course. People were all watching 
for the first indication of what was to come, and kept 
their eyes on the courts of Paris and London and 
Madrid ; but nobody suspected that the real champions 
of the time were already marshalling their forces in far 
different situations. There was a thoughtful monk in a 
convent in Germany, and a Spanish soldier before the walls 
of Pampeluna. These were the true movers of men's 
minds, of the great thoughts by which events are created ; 
and their names were soon to sound louder than those of 
Henry or Charles or Francis; for one was Martin Luther, 
the hero of the Reformation, and the other was Ignatius 
Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits. Take note of them 
here as mere accessories to the march of general history : 
we shall return to them again as characteristics of the 
century on which they placed their indelible mark. At 
this time, in the gay young days of the three crowned 
striplings, these future combatants are totally unknown. 
Brother Martin is singing charming hymns to the Virgin, 
in a voice which it was delightful to hear; and Don 
Ignacio is also singing to his guitar the praises of one 
of the beautiful maidens of his native land. Public 
opinion was still stagnant with regard to home-affairs, 
in spite of the efforts of the infant press. People, bowed 
down by the claims of implicit obedience exacted from 
them by the Church, accepted with wondering submis- 
sion the pontificate of such an atrocious murderer as 
Alexander the Sixth; and some even ingeniously founded 
an argument of the divine institution of the Papacy 
upon its having survived the eleven years' desecration 
of that monster of cruelty and unbelief. Yet now it 
happened by a strange coincidence that the chair of St. 
Peter was to be filled by a gayer and more accomplished 
ruler than any of the earthly thrones we have men- 
tioned. In 1513, Leo the Tenth, the most celebrated of 



VENICE. 407 

the family of the Medicis of Florence, put on the tiara 
at the age of thirty-six, a period of life which was con- 
sidered as youthful for the father of Christendom, as 
even the boyish years of the temporal kings. And Leo 
did not belie the promise of his juvenility. None of the 
dullness of age, or even the caution of maturity, was 
perceived in his public or private conduct. He was a 
patron of arts and sciences, and buffoonery, and infi- 
delity; and it is curious to observe how the pretensions 
of Eome were more shaken by the frivolous magnifi- 
cence of a good-hearted, graceful voluptuary than they 
had been by the crimes of his two immediate prede- 
cessors, the truculent Borgia and the warlike Julius the 
Second. 

This latter pontiff was intended by nature for a leader 
of Free Lances, to live forever in " the joy of battle/' 
and must have felt a little out of his element as the head 
of the Christian Church. However, he rapidly dis- 
covered that he was a secular prince as well as a 
spiritual teacher, and cast his eyes in the former ca- 
pacity with ominous ill will on the industrious Eepublic 
of Yenice. The fishermen and fugitives of many cen- 
turies before, who had settled among the Adriatic 
lagoons, had risen into the position of princes and 
treasurers of Europe. By their possessions in the East, 
and their trading-factories established along the whole 
route from India to the Mediterranean, they had made 
themselves the intermediaries between the barbaric 
pearls and gold, the silks and spices, of the Oriental 
regions, and the requirements of the West. Their gal- 
leys were daily bringing them the commodities of the 
Levant, which they distributed at an exorbitant profit 
among the nations beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. 
Mercantile wealth and maritime enterprise elevated the 
taste and confidence of those Venetian traffickers, till 



408 SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 

their whole territory, amid the lifeless waters of their 
canals, was covered with stately palaces, and their fleets 
assumed the dominion of the inland seas. On the main- 
land they had stretched their power over Dalmatia and 
Trieste, and in their own peninsula over Rimini and 
Ferrara and a great part of the Romagna. Two ruling 
passions agitated the soul of Julius the Second : one was 
to recover whatever territory or influence had once 
belonged to the Holy See ; the other was to expel the 
hated barbarian, whether Frenchman, or Swiss, or 
Austrian, from the soil of Italy. To achieve this last 
object he would sacrifice any thing except the first; 
and to unite the two was difficult. He made his ap- 
proaches to Yenice in a gentle manner at first. He 
asked her to restore the lands she had lately won, 
which he claimed as appendages of his chair, because 
they had been torn unjustly from the original holders 
by Caesar Borgia, the son of Alexander the Infamous ; 
and if she had agreed to this he would no doubt have 
proceeded with his further scheme of banishing all 
ultramontane invaders. But as the commercial council 
of the great emporium hesitated at giving up what they 
had entered in their books as fairly their own, he altered 
his note in a moment, put on the insignia of his holy 
office, and, denouncing the astonished republic as rebel- 
lious and ungrateful to Mother Church, he called in the 
aid of the very French whom he was so anxious to get 
quit of, to execute his judgment upon the offending 
State. Yenice was rich, and France at that time was 
poor and at all times is greedy. So preparations were 
made for an assault with the readiness and glee with 
which a party of freebooters would make a descent on 
the Bank of England. The temptation also was too 
great to be resisted by other kings and princes, who 
were as hungry for spoil and as attached to religion as 



LEAGUE OF CAMBRAI. 409 

the French. So in an incredibly short space of time the 
league of Cambrai was joined by Maximilian, the Empe- 
ror of Germany, and Ferdinand of Spain, and dukes 
and marquesses of less note. There were few of the 
Southern potentates, indeed, who had not some cause 
„ > of complaint against the haughty Yenetians. 

a.d. 1508. r ° ° • / 

Some (as the German Maximilian) they had 
humbled by defeat ; others they had insulted by their 
purse-proud insolence j others, again, by superiority in 
commercial skill ; and all, by the fact of being wealthy 
and, as they fancied, weak. 

Louis the Twelfth of France was first in the field. He 
conquered at Agnadello, and, forcing his way to the 
shore, alarmed the marble halls of the Yenetians with 
the sound of his harmless cannonade. The Pope was 
next, and took possession of the towns he wanted. The 
Duke of Ferrara laid hold of some loose articles in the 
confusion, and the Marquis of Mantua got back some 
villages' which his grandfather had lost. Maximilian 
was disconsolate at not being in time for the general 
pillage, and had to content himself with Padua and 
Yicenza and Yerona. Maximilian was a gentleman in 
difficulties, who has the misfortune to be known in his- 
tory as Max the Penniless. The Yenetians sent to tell 
him they were ready to acknowledge his suzerainty as 
emperor, and to pay him a tribute of fifty thousand 
ducats. The man would have forgiven them a hundred 
times their offences for half the money, and was anxious 
to close with their offer. But they had made no similar 
proposition to the French king, nor to Ferdinand, nor 
even of a ten-pound note to the Mantuan Marquis or 
the Magnifico of Ferrara. Wherefore they all began to 
hate the emperor. Louis declined to give him any more 
assistance. Julius sent a secret message to the Yene- 
tians that Holy Church was not inexorable j and Yenice, 

35 



410 



SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 



relying on the plaeability of Borne, hung out her flag 
against her secular foes in prouder defiance than ever. 
She knelt at the feet of the Pope, and allowed him to 
retain his acquisitions in Bomagna and elsewhere ; and 
as his first object, the enrichment of his domain, was 
accomplished, he lost no time in carrying out the 
second. By the fortunate possession of an unlimited 
power of loosing mankind from unpleasant oaths 
and obligations, he astonished his late confede- 
rates by publishing a sentence releasing the Venetians 
from the censures of the Church and the Allies from the 
covenants of the Treaty of Cambrai. He then joined 
the pontifical forces to the troops of Yenice, and in hot 
haste made a rush upon the French. He bought over 
Ferdinand of Spain to the cause by giving him the in- 
vestiture of Naples, hired a multitude of Swiss mercen- 
aries, and, drawing the sword like a stout man-at-arms 
as he was, he laid siege to Mirandola. In spite of his 
great age, — he was now past seventy, — he performed all 
the offices of an active general, visited the trenches, en- 
couraged his army, and after a two months' bombard- 
ment disdained to enter the city by the opened gate, 
but was triumphantly carried in military pomp through 
a breach in the shattered wall. His perfidy as a states- 
man and audacity as a soldier were too much for the 
„ „ Emperor and the Kins: of France. They col- 

A.D. 1511. t i ' 

lected as many troops as they could, and threat- 
ened to summon a general council; for what excommu- 
nication as an instrument of offence was to the popes, 
a general council was to the civil power. The French 
clergy met at Tours, and supported the Crown against 
Julius. The German emperor was still more indignant. 
He published a paper of accusations, in which the bitter- 
ness of his penniless condition is not concealed. " The 
enormous sums daily extracted from Germany," he 



MAXIMILIAN. 411 

says, "are perverted to tlie purposes of luxury or 
worldly views, instead of being employed for the service 
of God or against the Infidels. So extensive a territory 
has been alienated for the benefit of the Pope that 
scarcely a florin of revenue remains to the Emperor in 
Italy." Louis and the French appeared triumphant in 
the field; but their triumphs threw them into dismay, 
for their protean adversary, when defeated as temporal 
prince, thundered against them as successor of St. Peter, 
and taught them that their victories were impiety and 
their acquisitions sacrilege. A hard case for Louis, 
where if he retreated his territories were seized, and if 
he advanced his soul was in danger. The war, which 
had begun as a combination against Venice, was now 
converted into a holy league in defence of Pome. 
Spaniards came to the rescue ; and Henry, the youthful 
champion of England, and all who either thought they 
loved religion or who really hated France, were inspired 
i-'L' as if for a crusade. And Maximilian himself, 

A.D. 1012. ' 

poor and friendless, — how was it possible for 
him to continue obstinately to reject the overtures of 
the Pope, the purse of the Yenetians, or the far more 
tempting whisperings of Ferdinand of Aragon, who said 
to him, " Julius is very old. Would it not be possible 
to win over the cardinals to make your majesty his suc- 
cessor V Such a golden dream had never suggested it- 
self to the pauperized emperor before. He swallowed 
the bait at once. He determined to bribe the Sacred 
College, and, to raise the necessary funds, pawned the 
archducal mantle of Austria to the rich merchants, the 
Fuggers of Antwerp, for a large sum, and wrote to his 
daughter Margaret, " To-morrow I shall send a bishop 
to the Pope, to conclude an agreement with him that I 
may be appointed his coadjutor and on his death succeed 
to the Papacy, that you may be bound to worship me, — 



412 SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 

of which I shall be very proud." This may appear a 
rather jocular announcement of so serious a design; but 
there is no doubt that the project was entertained. 
Matters, however, advanced at too rapid a pace for the 
slow calculations of politicians. The French, by a noble 
victory at Kavenna, established their fame as warriors, 
and roused the fear of all the other powers. Maxi- 
milian grasped at last the Venetian ducats which had 
been offered him so long before, and turned suddenly 
against his ally. Ferdinand and Henry pressed for- 
ward on France itself on the side of the Pyrenees. 
Foot by foot the land of Italy was set free from the 
French invaders, and Julius the Second, dying before 
the emperor's plans were matured, left the tangled web 
of European politics to be unravelled by a younger 
hand. 

We have dwelt on this strange contest, where many 
sovereign states combined to overthrow a colony of 
traders, and failed in all their attempts, because it is the 
last great appearance that Yenice has made in the 
general history of the world. From this time her power 
rapidly decayed. Her galleys lay rotting at their 
wharves, and the marriage of her Doge to the Sea was 
a symbol without a meaning. The discovery of a pass- 
age to India by the Cape, which we saw announced to 
Europe by Yasco da Gama in the last year of the late 
century, was a sentence of death to the carriers of the 
Adriatic. Commerce sought other channels and en- 
riched other lands. Wherever the merchant-vessels 
crowded the harbour, whether with the commodities of 
the East or West, the war-ship was sure to follow, and 
the treasures gained in traffic to be guarded by a navy. 
All the ports of Spain became rallying-places of wealth 
and power in this century. Portugal covered every sea 
with her guns and galleons; Holland rose to dignity 



TENDENCY TO CONSOLIDATION. 413 

and freedom by her heavy-armed marine ; and England 
began the career of enterprise and liberty which is still 
typified and assured by the preponderance of her com- 
mercial and royal fleets. Questions are asked — which 
the younger among us, who may live to see the answer, 
may amuse themselves by considering — as to the chance 
of Yenice recovering her ancient commerce if the path- 
way of Eastern trade be again traced down the Medi- 
terranean, when the Isthmus of Suez shall be cut 
through by a canal or curtailed by a railway. In 
former times the whole civilized world lay like a golden 
fringe round the shores of that one sea, and the nation 
which predominated there, either in wealth or arms, 
was mistress of the globe. But the case is altered now. 
If the Gates of Hercules were permanently closed, the 
commerce of the world would still go on; and, so far from 
a Mediterranean supremacy indicating a universal pre- 
eminence, it is perhaps worthy of remark that the only 
Mediterranean nations which have in later times been 
recognised as of first-rate rank in Europe have had 
their principal ports upon the Atlantic and in the 
Channel. 

There is a circumstance which we may observe as 
characteristic of many of the European states at this 
time, — the desire of combination and consolidation at 
home even more than of foreign conquest. In Spain 
the cessation of the oligarchy of kingships had esta- 
blished a national crown. The hopes of recasting the 
separated and mutilated limbs of ancient Latium into a 
gigantic Italy were rife in that sunny land of high re- 
solves and futile acts. In Germany, the official supre- 
macy of the emperor was insufficient to prevent the 
strong definement of the corporate nationalities. Hol- 
land secured its individuality by unheard-of efforts; and 
in England the great thought took possession of the 

35* 



414 SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 

political mind of a union of the whole island. Visions 
already floated before the statesmen on both sides of 
the Tweed of a Great Britain freed from intestine dis- 
turbance and guarded by undisputed seas. But the 
general intelligence was not yet sufficiently far ad- 
vanced. The Scotch were too Scotch and the English 
too English to sink their national differences; and we 
can only pay homage to the wisdom which by a mar- 
riage between the royal houses — James the Fourth, 
and Margaret of England — planted the promise 
which came afterwards to maturity in the junc- 
tion of the crowns in 1603, and the indissoluble union 
of the countries in 1707. 

Meantime, the wooing was of the harshest. The 
last great battle, Flodden, that marked the enmity of 
the kingdoms, was decided in this century, and has left 
a deep and sorrowful impression even to our own times. 
There is not a cottage in Scotland where "The Fight of 
Flodden" is not remembered yet. And its effects were 
so desolating and dispiriting that it may be considered 
the death-bed to the feeling of equality which had 
hitherto ennobled the weaker nation. From this time 
England held the position of a virtual superior, regu- 
lating her conduct without much regard to the dignity 
or self-respect of her neighbour, and employing the arts 
of diplomacy, and the meaner tricks of bribery and cor- 
ruption, only because they were more easy and less ex- 
pensive than the open method of invasion and conquest. 
" Scotland's shield" was indeed broken at Flodden, but 
her character for courage and honour remained. It 
was the treachery of Sol way Moss, and the venality of 
most of the surviving nobility, that were the real causes 
of her weakness, and of the subordinate place which at 
this time she held in Europe. 

Thus the object which in other nations had been 



CONDITION OF SCOTLAND. 415 

gained by a union of crowns was attained also in our 
island by the absence of opposition between the peoples. 
Eloclden and Pinkie may therefore be looked upon with 
kindlier eyes if they are regarded as steps to the forma- 
tion of so great a realm. No nation retained its feudal 
organization so long as Scotland, or so completely de- 
parted from the original spirit of feudalism. Instead of 
being leaders and protectors of their dependants, and at- 
tached vassals of the kings, the barons of the North were 
an oligarchy of armed conspirators both against the 
crown and the people. Few of the earlier Stuarts died 
in peaceful bed; for even those of them who escaped 
the dagger of the assassin were hunted to death by the 
opposition and falsehood of the chiefs. Perpetually 
engaged in plots against the throne or forays against 
each other, the Scottish nobility weakened their country 
both at home and abroad. Law could have no authority 
where mailed warriors settled every thing by the sword, 
and no resistance could be offered to a foreign enemy by 
men so divided among themselves. Down to a period 
when the other nations of Europe were under the rule 
of legal tribunals, the High Street of Edinburgh was 
the scene of violence and bloodshed between rival lords 
who were too powerful for control by the civil authority. 
A succession of foolishly rash or unwisely lenient sove- 
reigns left this ferocity and independence unchecked; 
and though poetry and patriotism now combine to cast 
a melancholy grace on the defeat at Flodden, from the 
Roman spirit with which the intelligence was received 
by the population of the capital, the unbiassed inquirer 
must confess that, with the exception of the single 
virtue of personal courage, the Scottish array was enno- 
bled by no quality which would have justified its success. 
It was ill commanded, ill disciplined, and ill combined. 
The nobility, as usual, were disaffected to the king and 



41G SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 

averse to the war. But the crown-tenants and com- 
monalty of the Lowlands were always ready for an 
affray with England; and James the Fourth, the most 
chivalrous of that line of chivalrous and unfortunate 
princes, merrily crossed the Border and prepared for 
„„„ , feats of arms as if at a tournament. The cau- 

A.D. 1513. 

tious Earl of Surrey, the leader of the English 
army, availed himself of the knightly prepossessions of 
his enemy, and sent a herald, in all the frippery of 
tabard and cross, to challenge him to battle on a set 
day, when Lord Thomas Howard would run a tilt with 
him at the head of the English van. James fell into the 
snare, and regulated his movements, in fact, by the 
direction of his opponent. When, in a momentary 
glimpse of common sense, he established his quarters 
on the side of a hill, from which it would have been im- 
possible to dislodge him, Surrey relied on the absurd 
generosity of his character, and sent a message to com- 
plain that he had placed himself on ground " more like 
a fortress or a camp than an ordinary battle-field." 
James pretended to despise the taunt, and even to refuse 
admission to the herald; but it worked on his susceptible 
and fearless nature; for we find that he allowed the 
English to pass through difficult and narrow ways, 
which were commanded by his guns, and when they 
were fairly marshalled on level ground he set fire to his 
tents and actually descended the hill to place himself on 
equal terms with the foe. Such a beginning had the 
only possible close. Strong arms and sharp swords are 
excellent supports of generalship, but cannot always be 
a substitute for it. Never did the love of fight so in- 
herent in the Scottish character display itself more 
gallantly than on this day. Again and again the Scot- 
tish earls dashed forward against the English squares. 
These were composed of the steadiest of the pikemen, 



FLODDEN. 417 

flanked by the wondrous archers who had turned so 
many a tide of battle. Fain would the veteran warriors 
have kept their men in check; fain would the com- 
manders of the French auxiliaries have restrained the 
Scottish advance. But the Northern blood was up. 
Onward they went, in spite of generalship and all the 
rules of discipline, and with a great crash burst upon 
the wall of steel. It was magnificent, as the Frenchmen 
said at Balaklava, but it was not war. Eepelled by the 
recoil of their own impetuous charge, they fell into 
fragments and encumbered the gory plain. Yery few 
fled, very few had the opportunity of flying; for the 
cloth-yard shaft never missed its aim. There was no 
crying for quarter or sparing of the flashing blade. 
Both sides were irritated to madness. James pushed 
on, shouting and waving his bloody sword, and was 
wounded by an arrow and gashed with a ponderous 
battle-axe when he had forced himself within a few 
paces of Surrey. Darkness was now closing in. The 
king's death was rapidly known, but still the struggle 
went on. At length the wearied armies ceased to kill. 
The Scotch retreated, and in the dawn of the next 
morning a compact body of them was seen still threaten- 
ing on the side of a distant hill. But the day was lost 
and won. The chivalry of Scotland received a blow 
from which it never recovered. What Courtrai had 
been to the French, and G-ranson and Nanci to the Bur- 
gundians, and Towton and Tewkesbury to the English, 
the 9th of September, 1513, was to the peerage of the 
North. Thirteen earls were killed, fifteen barons, and 
chiefs and members of all the gentle houses in the land. 
Some were stripped utterly desolate by this appalling 
slaughter ; and from many a hall, as well as from humble 
shieling, rose the burden of the tearful ballad, "The 
flowers o' the forest are a' wedd awa'." There were ten 

2B 



418 SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 

thousand slain in the field, the gallant James cut off in 
the prime of strength and manhood, and the sceptre 
which required the grasp of an Edward the First left to 
be the prize of an unprincipled queen-mother, or any 
ambitious cabal which could conspire to seize it. James 
the Fifth was but a year or two old, and the country 
discouraged and demoralized. 

But Henry the Eighth was destined to some other 
triumphs in this fortunate year. First there was the 
victory which his forces won at Gruinegate, near Calais, 
where the French chivalry fled in the most ignominious 
manner, and struck their rowels into their horses' flanks, 
without remembering that they carried swords in their 
hands. This is known in history as the second Battle 
of the Spurs, — not, as at Courtrai, for the number of 
those knightly emblems taken off the heels of the dead, 
but for the amazing activity they displayed on the heels 
of the living. And, secondly, he could boast that the 
foremost man in Christendom wore his livery and 
pocketed his pay; for Maximilian the Penniless, suc- 
cessor of Charlemagne and Constantine and Augustus, 
enlisted and did good service as an English trooper at 
a hundred crowns a day. Let Henry rejoice in these 
achievements while he may; for the time is drawing 
near when the old sovereigns of Europe are to be moved 
out of the way and France and Spain are to be governed 
by younger men and more ambitious politicians than 
himself. Evil times indeed were at hand, when it 
required the strength of youth and wisdom of policy to 
guide the bark not only of separate states, but of settled 
law and Christian civilization. For, however pleasant 
it may be to trace Henry through his home-career and 
Francis and Charles in their national rivalries, we are 
not to forget that the real interest of this century is 
that it is the century of the Reformation, — a movement 



STATE OF THE CHURCH. 419 

before whose overwhelming importance the efforts of 
the greatest individuals sink into insignificance, — an 
upheaving of hidden powers and principles, which in 
truth so altered all former relations between man and 
man that it found the most influential personage in 
Europe, not in the Apostolic Emperor, or the Christian 
King, or the Defender of the Faith, but in a burly friar 
at Wittenberg, whose name had never been heard 
before. 

Let us see what was the general condition of the Eomish 
Chair before the outburst of its enemies at this time. One 
thing is very observable : that its claims to supremacy and 
obedience were, ostensibly at least, almost universally 
acquiesced in. From Norway to Calabria the theory 
of a Universal Church, divinely founded and divinely 
sustained, in possession of superhuman power and un- 
communicated knowledge, governed by an infallible 
chief, and administered by an uninterrupted line of 
priests and bishops, who had given up the vanities of 
the world, satisfier of doubts, and sole instrument of 
salvation, — this seemed so perfect and so natural an 
organization that it had been accepted from time im- 
memorial as incapable of denial. If a voice was heard 
here and there in an Alpine valley or in a scholastic 
debating-room impugning these arrangements or asking 
proof from history or revelation, the civil power was 
let loose upon the gain say er, with the general consent 
of orthodox men, and the Vaudois were murdered with 
sword and spear and the inquiring student chained in 
his monkish cell. The theory and organization of the 
Universal Church were, in fact, never so well defined as 
at the moment when its reign was drawing to a close. 
Nobody doubted that a general Father, clothed in in- 
fallible wisdom, and armed with powers directly com- 
mitted to him for the guidance or punishment of man- 



420 SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 

kind, was the Heaven-sent arbiter of differences, the 
rewarder of faithful kings, the corrector of unruly 
nations; and yet the spectacle was presented, to the 
believers in this ideal, of a series of wicked and aban- 
doned rulers sitting in Peter's chair, and only imitating 
the apostle in his furiousness and his denial; cardinals 
depraved and worldly beyond the example of temporal 
princes; a priesthood steeped, for the most part, in 
ignorance and vice, and monks and nuns the opprobria 
of all nations where they were found. Never were 
claims and performances brought into such startling 
contrast before. The Pope was the representative upon 
earth of the Saviour of men; and he poisoned his guests, 
like Borgia, slew his opponents, like Julius, or led the 
life of an intellectual epicure, like Leo the Tenth. In 
former times the contrariety between doctrine and 
practice would have been slightly known or easily re- 
conciled. Few comparatively visited Eome; cardinals 
were seldom seen ; priests were not more ignorant than 
their parishioners, and monks not more wicked than 
their admirers. All believed in the miraculous efficacy 
of the wares in which even the lower order of the 
clergy dealt, and their rule in country places was so lax, 
their penances so easily performed or commuted, their 
relations with their people so friendly and on such equal 
terms, that in the rural districts the voice of complaint 
was either unheard or neglected. In Italy, the head- 
quarters of the faith, the excesses of priestly rule were 
the most glaring and wide-spread. Rome itself was 
always the seat of turbulence and disaffection. The 
lives of professedly holy men were known, and the vices 
of popes and prelates pressed heavily on the people, who 
were the first victims of their avarice or cruelty. But 
the utmost extent of their indignation never reached to 
a questioning of the foundation of the power from which 



EELIGION OF THE ITALIAN. 421 

they suffered. An Italian crushed to the earth by the 
extortion of his Church, irritated perhaps by the per- 
sonal wickedness of his director, sought no escape from 
such inflictions in disbelieving either the temporal or 
spiritual authority of his oppressor. Eather he would 
have looked with savage satisfaction on the fagot-fire of 
any one who hinted that the principles of his Church 
required the slightest amendment ; that the absolution 
of his sensual confessor was not altogether indispen- 
sable ; that the image he bowed down to was common 
wood, or that the relics he worshipped were merely 
dead men's bones. Perhaps, indeed, in those luxurious 
regions, a bare and unadorned worship would not seem 
to be worship at all. With his impassioned mind and 
glowing fancy, the Spaniard or Italian must pour out 
his whole being on the object of his adoration. He 
loves his patron saint with the warmth of an earthly 
affection, and thinks he undervalues her virtues or her 
claims if he does not heap her shrine with his offerings 
and address her image with rapture. He must make 
external demonstration of his inward feelings, or no- 
body will believe in their existence. The crouchings 
and kneelings, therefore, which our colder natures stig- 
matize as idolatry, are to him nothing more than the 
outward manifestation of affection and thankfulness. 
He does the same to his master or his benefactor with- 
out degradation in the eyes of his countrymen. With- 
out these bowings and genuflections his conduct would 
be thought ungrateful and disrespectful. That this 
amount of warm-hearted sincerity is wasted upon such 
unworthy objects as his saints and relics is greatly to be 
deplored; but wide allowances must be made for pecu- 
liarities of situation and disposition ; and we should re- 
member that whereas in the IsTorth a religion of forms 
and ceremonies would be a body without a soul, because 

36 



422 



SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 



there would be no inward exaltation answering to the. 
outward manifestation, the Southern heart sees a mean- 
ing where there is none to us, is conscious of a sense of 
trust and reverence where we only see slavishness and 
imposture, and a feeling of divine consolation and hope 
in services which to us are histrionic and absurd. Re- 
ligious belief, in the sense of a true and undivided faith 
in the doctrines of Christianity, had no recognised 
existence at the period we have reached. But this ab- 
sence of religious belief was combined, however strange 
the statement may appear, with a most implicit trust in 
the directions and authority of the Church. Sunny 
skies might have shone forever over the political abase- 
ment and slightly Christianized paganism of the inhabit- 
ants of the two peninsulas and the Southeast of Europe, 
but a cloud was about to rise in the North which dimmed 
them for a time, but which, after it burst in purifying 
thunder, has refreshed and cleared the atmosphere of 
the whole world. 

The first book that Guttenberg published in 1451 was 
the Holy Bible, — in the Latin language, to be sure, and 
after the Yulgate edition, but still containing, to those 
who could gather it, the manna of the Word. Two years 
after that, in 1453, the capture of Constantinople by the 
Turks had scattered the learning of the Greeks among 
all the nations of the West. The universities were soon 
supplied with professors, who displayed the hitherto- 
unexplored treasures of the language of Pericles and 
Demosthenes. Everywhere a spirit of inquiry began to 
reawaken, but limited as yet to subjects of philosophy 
and antiquity. Christianity, indeed, had so lost its hold 
on the minds of scholars that it was not considered 
worth inquiring into. It was looked on as a fable, and 
only profitable as an instrument of policy. Erasmus 
was alarmed at the state of feeling in 1516, and ex- 



LUTHER. 423 

pressed Ins belief that, if those Grecian studies were 
pursued, the ancient deities would resume their sway. 
But the Bible was already reaping its appointed harvest. 
Its voice, lost in the din of speculative philosophies and 
the dissipation of courts, was heard in obscure places, 
where it never had penetrated before. In 1505, Luther 
was twenty-two years of age. He had made himself a 
scholar by attendance at schools where his poverty 
almost debarred him from appearing. At Eisenach he 
gained his bread by singing at the richer inhabitants' 
doors. Afterwards he had gone to Erfurt, and, tired or 
afraid of the world, anxious for opportunities of self- 
examination, and dissatisfied with his spiritual state, he 
entered the convent of the Augustines, and in two years 
more, in 1507, became priest and monk. There was an 
amazing amount of goodness and simplicity of life 
among the brotherhood of this community. Learning 
and devout meditation were encouraged, holy ascetic 
lives were led, the body was kept under with fastings 
and stripes. A Bible was open to them all, but chained 
to its place in the chapel, and only to be studied by 
standing before the desk on which it lay. All these 
things were insufficient, and Brother Martin was mise- 
rable. His companions pitied and respected him. Stau- 
pitz, a man of great rank in the Church, a sort of in- 
spector-general of a large district, visited the convent, 
and in a moment was attracted by the youthful monk. 
He conversed with him, soothed his agitated mind, not 
with anodynes from the pharmacopoeia of the Church, 
but from the fountain-head of the faith. He painted 
God as the forgiver of sinners, the Father of all men; 
and Luther took some comfort. But, on going away, 
the kind-hearted Staupitz gave the young man a Bible, 
— a Bible all to himself, his own property, to carry in 
his bosom, to study in his cell. His vocation was at 



424 SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 

once fixed. The Reformer felt his future all before him, 
like Achilles when he grasped the sword and rejected 
the feminine toys. The books he had taken with him 
into the monastery were Plautus and Virgil; but he 
studied plays and epics no more. Augustin and the 
Bible supplied their place. Hungering for better things 
than the works of the law, — abstinence, prayer-repe- 
titions, scourgings, and all the wearisome routine of 
mechanical devotion, — he dashed boldly into the other 
extreme, and preached free grace, — grace without 
merit, the great doctrine which is called, theologically, 
"justification by faith alone." This had been the main 
theme of his master Augustin, and Luther now gave it 
practical shape. In 1510 he was sent on some business 
of his convent to Rome, — to Rome, the head-quarters of 
the Church, the earthly residence of the infallible ! 
How holy will be its dwellings, how gracious the words 
of its inhabitants! The G-erman monk saw nothing but 
sin and infidelity. In high places as in low, the taint 
of corruption was polluting all the air. In terror and 
dismay, he left the city of iniquity within a fortnight of 
his arrival, and hurried back to the peacefulness of his 
convent. " I would not for a hundred thousand florins 
have missed seeing Rome/' he said, long afterwards. 
" I should always have felt an uneasy doubt whether I 
was not, after all, doing injustice to the Pope. As it is, 
1 am quite satisfied on the point." The Pope was Julius 
the Second, whose career we followed in the League of 
Cambrai ; and we may enter into the surprise of Luther 
at seeing the Father of the Faithful breathing blood and 
ruin to his rival neighbours. But the force of early 
education was still unimpaired. The Pope was Pope, 
and the devout G-erman thought of him on his knees. 
But in the year 1517 a man of the name of Tetzel, a 
Dominican of the rudest manners and most brazen 



PAPAL INDULGENCES. 425 

audacity, appeared in the market-place of Wittenberg, 
ringing a bell, and hawking indulgences from the Holy 
See to be sold to all the faithful. A new Pope was on 
the throne, — the voluptuous Leo the Tenth. He had 
resolved to carry on the building of the great Church 
of St. Peter, and, having exhausted his funds in riotous 
living, he sent round his emissaries to collect fresh 
treasures by the sale of these pardons for human sin. 
" Pour in your money," cried Tetzel, " and whatever 
crimes you have committed, or may commit, are for- 
given ! Pour in your coin, and the souls of your friends 
and relations will fly out of purgatory the moment they 
hear the chink of your dollars at the bottom of the box." 
Luther was Doctor of Divinity, Professor in the Univer- 
sity, and pastoral visitor of two provinces of the empire. 
He felt it was his duty to interfere. He learned for the 
first time himself how far indulgences were supposed to 
go, and shuddered at the profanity of the notion of 
their being of any value whatever. On the festival of 
All Saints, in November, 1517, he read a series of pro- 
positions against them in the great church, and startled 
all Germany like a thunderbolt with a printed sermon 
on the same subject. The press began its work, and 
people no longer fought in darkness. Nationalities 
were at an end when so wide-embracing a subject was 
treated by so universal an agent. The monk's voice 
was heard in all lands, even in the walls of Eome, and 
crossed the sea, and came in due time to England. 
* Tush, tush ! 'tis a quarrel of monks," said Leo the 
Tenth; and, with an affectation of candour, he re- 
marked, " This Luther writes well : he is a man of fine 
genius." 

G-allant young Henry the Eighth thought it a good 
opportunity to show his talent, and meditated an 
assault on the heretic, — a curious duel between a pale 

36* 



42G SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 

recluse and the gayest prince in Christendom. But the 
recluse was none the worse when the book was published, 
and the prince earned from the gratitude of the Poj:>e the 
name " Defender of the Faith/' which is still one of the 
titles of the English crown. Penniless Maximilian looked 
on well pleased, and wrote to a Saxon counsellor, "All 
the popes I have had any thing to do with have been 
rogues and cheats. The game with the priests is begin- 
ning. What your monk is doing is not to be despised : 
take care of him. It may happen that we shall have 
need of him." Luther's own prince, the Elector of 
Saxony, was his firm friend, and on one side or other 
all Europe was on the gaze. Leo at last perceived 
the danger, and summoned the monk to Borne. He 
might as well have yielded in the struggle at once, 
for from Eome he never could have returned alive. 
He consented, however, to appear before the Legate 
at Augsburg, attended by a strong body-guard fur- 
nished by the Elector, and held his ground against 
the threats and promises of the Cardinal of Cajeta. But 
Maximilian carried his poverty and disappointment to 
the grave in 1519 ; and when Leo saw the safe accession 
of his successor Charles the Fifth, the faithful servant 
of St. Peter, he pushed matters with a higher hand 
against the daring innovator. Brother Martin, how- 
ever, was unmoved. He would not retreat j he even ad- 
vanced in his course, and wrote to the Pope himself an 
account of the iniquities of Eome. " You have three or 
four cardinals," he says, "of learning and faith; but 
what are these three or four in so vast a crowd of in- 
fidels and reprobates ? The days of Eome are numbered, 
and the anger of God has been breathed forth upon her. 
She hates councils, she dreads reforms, and will not 
hear of a check being placed on her desperate impiety" 
This was a dangerous man to meet with such devices as 



DIET OF WORMS. 42 ~ 

bulls and interdicts. Charles determined to try harsher 
measures, and summoned him to appear at a Diet of the 
States held in Worms. The emperor was now twenty- 
one years old. His sceptre stretched over the half of 
Europe, and across the great sea to the golden realm of 
Mexico. Martin begged a new gown from the not very 
lavish Elector, and went in a sort of chariot to the ap- 
pointed city, — serene and confident, for he had a safe- 
conduct from the emperor and various princes, and 
fi' trusted in the goodness of his cause. Such 

A.D. 1521. to 

a scene never occurred in any age of the world 
as was presented when the assemblage met. All the 
peers and potentates of the G-erman Empire, presided 
Over by the most powerful ruler that ever had been 
known in Europe, were gathered to hear the trial and 
condemnation of a thin, wan-visaged young man, dressed 
in a monk's gown and hood and worn with the fatigues 
and hazards of his recent life. " Yet prophet-like that 
lone one stood, with dauntless words and high," and 
answered all questions with force and modesty. But 
answers were not what the Diet required, and retracta- 
tion was far from Luther's mind. So the Chancellor of 
Treves came to him and said, "Martin, thou art dis- 
obedient to his Imperial Majesty : wherefore depart 
hence under the safe-conduct he has given thee." And 
the monk departed. As he was nearing his destination, 
and was passing through a wood alone, some horsemen 
seized his person, dressed him in military garb, and put 
on him a false beard. They then mounted him on a led 
horse and rode rapidly away. His friends were anxious 
ahout his fate, for a dreadful sentence had been uttered 
against him by the emperor on the day when his safe- 
conduct expired, forbidding any one to sustain or shel- 
ter him, and ordering all persons to arrest and bring 
him into prison to await the judgment he deserved. 



428 SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 

People thought he had been waylaid and killed, or at all 
events sent into a dungeon. Meantime he was living 
peaceably and comfortably in the castle of Wartburg, 
to which he had been conveyed in this mysterious 
manner by his friend the Elector, — safe from the machi- 
nations of his enemies, and busily engaged in his im- 
mortal translation of the Bible. 

The movement thus communicated by Luther knew 
no pause nor end. It soon ceased to be a merely 
national excitement caused by local circumstances, and 
became the one great overwhelming question of the 
time. Every thing was brought into its vortex : how- 
ever distant might be its starting-point, to this great 
central idea it was sure to attach itself at last. Invo- 
luntarily, unconsciously, unwillingly, every government 
found that the Eeformation formed part of its scheme 
and policy. One nation, and one only, had the clear 
eye and firm hand to make it ostensibly, and of its de- 
liberate choice, the guide and landmark in its dangerous 
and finally triumphant career. This was England, — ■ 
not when under the degrading domination of its Henry 
or the heavy hand of its Mary, but under the skilful 
piloting of the great Elizabeth, the first of rulers who 
seems to have perceived that submission to a foreign 
priest is a political error on the part both of kings and 
subjects, and that occupation by a foreign army is not 
more subversive of freedom and independence than the 
supremacy of a foreign Church. Hitherto England had 
been nearly divided from the whole world, and was 
merely one of the distant satellites that revolved on the 
outside of the European system, the centre of which 
was Eome. She was now to burn with light of her 
own. The Continent, indeed, at the commencement of 
the Eeformation, seemed almost in a state of dissolu- 
tion. In 1529 disunion had attained such a pitch in the 



LEAGUE OF SMALCALDE. 429 

Empire that the different princes were ranged on hostile 
sides. At the Diet of Spires, in this year, the name of 
Protestant had been assumed by the opponents of the 
excesses and errors of the Church of Eome. At the 
same time that the religious unity was thus finally 
thrown off, the Turks were thundering at the Eastern 
gates of Europe, and Solyman of Constantinople laid 
siege to Yienna. France was exhausted with her in- 
ternal troubles. Spain came to the rescue of the out- 
raged faith, and made heresy punishable with death 
throughout all her dominions. While the Netherlands, 
against which this was directed, was groaning under 
this new infliction, disorder seemed to extend over the 
solid earth itself. There were earthquakes and great 
storms in many lands. Lisbon was shaken into ruins, 
with a loss of thirty thousand inhabitants; and the 
dykes of Holland were overwhelmed by a prodigious 
rising of the sea, and four hundred thousand people 
were drowned. 

Preparations were made in all quarters for a great 
and momentous struggle: nobody could tell where it 
would break forth or where it would end. And ever 
and anon Luther's rallying-cry was heard in answer to 
the furious denunciations of cardinals and popes. In- 
terests get parcelled out in so many separate portions 
that it is impossible to unravel the state of affairs with 
any clearness. We shall only notice that, in 1531, the 
famous league of Smalcalde first embodied Protestantism 
in its national and lay constitution by the banding to- 
gether of nine of the sovereign princes of G-ermany, and 
eleven free cities, in armed defence, if needed, of their 
religious belief. Where is the fiery Henry of England, 
with his pen or sword? A very changed man from 
what we saw him only thirteen years ago. He has no 
pen now, and his sword is kept for his discontented sub- 



430 SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 

jects at home. In 1534, King and Lord/ 3 and Commons, 
in Parliament assembled, threw off the supremacy of 
Rome, and Henry is at last a king, for his courts hold 
cognizance of all causes within the realm, whether 
ecclesiastical or civil. Everybody knows the steps by 
which this embodied selfishness achieved his emancipa- 
tion from a dominant Church. It little concerns us 
now, except as a question o f historic curiosity, what his 
motives were. Judging from the analogy of all his 
other actions, we should say they were bad; but by 
some means or other the evil deeds of this man were 
generally productive of benefit to his country. He cast 
off the Pope that he might be freed from a disagreeable 
wife; but as the Pope whom he rejected was the servant 
of Charles, (the nephew of the repudiated queen,) he 
found that he had freed his kingdom at the same time 
from its degrading vassalage to the puppet of a rival 
monarch. He dissolved the monasteries in England for 
the purpose of grasping their wealth ; but the country 
found he had at the same time delivered it from a swarm 
of idle and mischievous corporations, which in no long 
time would have swallowed up the land. Their revenues 
were immense, and the extent of their domains almost 
incredible. Before people had recovered from their 
disgust at the hateful motives of their tyrant's beha- 
viour, the results of it became apparent in the elevation 
of the finest class of the English population ; for the 
" bold peasantry, their country's pride," began to esta- 
blish their independent holdings on the parcelled-out 
territories of the monks and nuns. Vast tracts of 
ground were thrown open to the competition of lay pro- 
prietors. Even the poorest was not without hope of 
becoming an owner of the soil; nay, the released estates 
were so plentiful that in Elizabeth's reign an act was 
passed making it illegal for a man to build a cottage 



CHANGED ASPECT OF EUROPE. 431 

" unless he laid four acres of land thereto." The cot- 
tager, therefore, became a small farmer; and small 
farmers were the defence of England ; and the defence 
of England was the safety of freedom and religion 
throughout the world. There were some hundred thou- 
sands of those landed cottagers and smaller gentry and 
great proprietors established by this most respectable 
sacrilege of Henry the Eighth, and for the sake of these 
excellent consequences we forgive him his pride and 
cruelty and all his faults. But Henry's work was done, 
and in January, 1547, he died. The rivals with whom 
he started on the race of life were still alive; but life 
was getting dark and dreary with both of them. 
Francis was no longer the hero of " The Field of the 
Cloth-of-Gold," conqueror of Marignano, the gallant 
captive of Pavia, or the winner of all hearts. He was 
worn out with a life of great vicissitudes, and heard 
with ominous foreboding the news of Henry's death. 
A fate seemed to unite them in all those years of 
revelry and hate and friendship, and in a few weeks the 
March 11 m ost chivalrous and generous of the Valois 
1547. followed the most tyrannical of the Tudors to 
the tomb. A year before this, the Monk of Wittenberg, 
now the renowned and married Dr. Martin Luther, had 
left a place vacant which no man could fill; and now 
of all those combatants Charles was the sole survivor. 
Selfish as Henry, dissolute as Francis, obstinate as Mar- 
tin, his race also was drawing to a close. But the play 
was played out before these chief performers withdrew. 
All Europe had changed its aspect. The England, the 
France, the Empire, of five-and-twenty years before 
had utterly passed away. New objects were filling 
men's minds, new principles of policy were regulating 
states. Protestantism was an established fact, and the 
Treaty of Passau in 1552 gave liberty and equality to 



432 SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 

the professors of the new faith. Charles was sagacious 
though heartless as a ruler, but an unredeemed bigot as 
an individual man. The necessities of his condition, by 
which he was forced to give toleration to the enemies 
of the Church, weighed upon his heart. A younger 
hand and bloodier disposition, he thought, were needed 
to regain the ground he had been obliged to yield; and 
in Philip his son he perceived all these requirements 
fulfilled. When he looked round, he saw nothing to 
give him comfort in his declining years. War was 
going on in Hungary against the still advancing Turks; 
war was raging in Lorraine between his forces and the 
French ; Italy, the land of volcanoes, was on the eve of 
outbreak and anarchy ; and, thundering out defiance of 
the Imperial power and the Christian Cross, the guns 
of the Ottoman fleet were heard around the shores of 
Sicily and up to the Bay of Naples. The emperor was 
faint and weary : his armies were scattered and dispirit- 
ed; his fleets were unequal to their enemy: so in 1556 
he resigned his pompous title of monarch of Spain and 
the Indies, with all their dependencies, to his son, and 
the empire to his brother Ferdinand, who was already 
King of Hungary and Bohemia and hereditary Duke of 
Austria ; and then, with the appearance of resignation, 
but his soul embittered by anger and disappointment, 
he retired to the Convent of St. Just, where he gorged 
himself into insanity with gluttonies which would have 
disgraced Yitellius, and amused himself by interfering 
in state affairs which he had forsworn, and making 
watches which he could not regulate, and going through 
the revolting farce of a rehearsal of his funeral, with his 
body in the coffin and the monks of the monastery for 
mourners. Those theatrical lamentations were probably 
as sincere as those which followed his real demise in 
1558 ; for when he surrendered the power which made 



THE REFORMATION. 433 

him respected he gave evidence only of the qualities 
which made him disliked. 

The Reformation, you remember, is the characteristic 
of this century. "We have traced it in Germany to its 
recognition as a separate and liberated faith. In England 
we are going to see Protestantism established and tri- 
umphant. Bat not yet; for we have first to notice a 
period when Protestantism seems at its last hour, when 
Mary, w T ife of the bigot Philip, and true and honourable 
daughter of the Church, is determined to restore her 
nation to the Bomish chair, or die in the holy attempt. 
We are not going into the minutiaa of this dreadful time, 
or to excite your feelings with the accounts of the burn- 
ings and torturings of the dissenters from the queen's 
belief. None of us are ignorant of the cruelty of those 
proceedings, or have read unmoved the sad recital of 
the martyrdom of the bishops and of such men as the 
joyous and innocent Rowland Taylor of Hadleigh. 
Men's hearts did not become hardened by these sights. 
Bather they melted with compassion towards the daunt- 
less sufferers j and, though the hush of terror kept the 
masses of the people silent, great thoughts were rising 
in the general mind, and toleration ripened even under 
the heat of the Smithfield fires. Attempts have been 
made to blacken Mary beyond her demerits and to 
whiten her beyond her deservings. Protestants have 
denied her the virtues she unquestionably possessed, — 
truthfulness, firmness, conscientiousness, and unim- 
peachable morals. Her panegyrists take higher ground, 
and claim for her the noblest qualifications both as 
queen and woman, — patriotism, love of her people, ful- 
filment of all her duties, and exquisite tenderness of dis- 
position. It will be sufficient for us to look at her 
actions, and we will leave her secret sentiments alone. 
"We shall only say that it is very doubtful whether the 

2 37 



434 SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 

plea of conscientiousness is admissible in such a case. 
If perverted reasoning or previous education has made 
a Thug feel it a point of conscience to put his throttling 
instrument under a quiet traveller's throat, the con- 
scientious belief of the performer that his act is for the 
good of the sufferer's soul will scarcely save him from 
the gallows. On the contrary, a conscientious persist- 
ence in what is manifestly wrong should be an aggrava- 
tion of the crime, for it gives an appearance of respect- 
ability to atrocity, and, when punishment overtakes the 
wrong-doers, makes the Thug an honoured martyr to 
his opinions, instead of a convicted felon for his mis- 
deeds. Let us hope that the rights of conscience will 
never be pleaded in defence of cruelty or persecution. 

The restoration of England to the obedience of the 
Church, the marriage of Mary, the warmest partisan of 
Popery, with Philip, the fanatical oppressor of 
the reformed, — these must have raised the hopes 
of Eome to an extraordinary pitch. But greater as a 
support, and more reliable than queens or kings, was the 
Society of the Jesuits, which at this time demonstrated 
its attachment to the Holy See, and devoted itself 
blindly, remorselessly, unquestioning, to the defence of 
the old faith. Having sketched the rise of Luther, a 
companion-picture is required of the fortunes of Igna- 
tius Loyola. We hinted that a Biscayan soldier, 
wounded at the siege of Pampeluna in Spain, divided 
the notice of Europe with the poor Austin Friar of 
"Wittenberg. Enthusiasm, rising almost into madness, 
was no bar, in the case >f this wonderful Spaniard, to 
the possession of faculties for government and organiza- 
tion which have never been surpassed. Shut out by the 
lameness resulting from his wound from the struggles 
of worldly and soldierly ambition, he gave full way to 
the mystic exaltation of his Southern disposition. He 



THE JESUITS. 



435 



devoted himself as knight and champion to the Virgin, 
heard with contempt and horror of the efforts made to 
deny the omnipotence of the Chair of Borne, and swore 
to be its defender. Others of similar sentiments joined 
him in his crusade against innovation. A company of 
self-denying, self-sacrificing men began, and, adding to 
the previous laws of their order a vow of unqualified 
submission to the Pope, they were recognised by a bull, 
'A\ n and the Societv of Jesus became the strongest 

A.D. 1540. J ... 

and most remarkable institution of modern 
times. Through all varieties of fortune, in exile and 
imprisonment, and even in dissolution, their oath of un- 
inquiring, unhesitating obedience to the papal command 
has never been broken. With Protean variety of ap- 
pearance, but unvarying identity of intention, these 
soldiers of St. Peter are as relentless to others, and as 
regardless of themselves, as the body-guard of the old 
Assassins. No degradation is too servile, no place too 
distant, no action too revolting, for these unreasoning 
instruments of power. Wilfully surrendering the right 
of judgment and the feelings of conscience into the 
hands of their superior, there is no method by law or 
argument of regulating their conduct. The one prin- 
ciple of submission has swallowed up all the rest, and 
fulfilment of that duty ennobles the iniquitous deeds by 
which it is shown. Other societies put a clause, either 
by words or implication, in their promise of obedience, 
limiting it to things which are just and proper. This 
limit is ostentatiously abrogated by the followers of 
Loyola. The merit of obeying an order to slay an 
enemy of the Church more than compensates for the 
guilt of the murder. In other orders a homicide is 
looked upon with horror ■ in this, a Jesuit who kills a 
heretical king by command of his chiefs is venerated as 
a saint. Against practices and feelings like these you 



436 



SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 



can neither reason nor be on your guard. In all king- 
doms, accordingly, at some time or other, the existence 
of the order has been found inconsistent with the safety 
of the State, and it has been dissolved by the civil power. 
The moment, however, the Church regains its hold, the 
Jesuits are sure to be restored. The alliance, indeed, is 
indispensable, and the mutual aid of the Order and of 
the Papacy a necessity of their existence. Incorporated 
in 1540, the brothers of the Company of Jesus consi- 
dered the defections of the Eeformation in a fair way of 
being compensated when the death of our little, cold- 
hearted, self-willed Edward the Sixth — a Henry the 
Eighth in the bud — left the throne in 1553 to Mary, a 
Henry the Eighth full blown. When nearly five years 
of conscientious truculence had shown the earnestness 

, rrn of this unhappy woman's belief, the accession 
A.d. 1558. x J J ' 

of Elizabeth inaugurated a new system in this 
country, from which it has never departed since without 
a perceptible loss both of happiness and power. A 
strictly home and national policy was immediately esta- 
blished by this most remarkable of our sovereigns, and 
pursued through good report and evil report, sometimes 
at the expense of her feelings — if she was so little of a 
Tudor as to have any — of tenderness and compassion, 
sometimes at the expense — and here she was Tudor 
enough to have very acute sensations indeed — of her 
personal and official dignity, but always with the one 
object of establishing a great united and irresistible bul- 
wark against foreign oppression and domestic disunion. 
It shows how powerful was her impression upon the 
course of European history, that her character is as 
fiercely canvassed at this day as in the speech of her 
contemporaries. Nobody feels as if Elizabeth was a 
personage removed from us b} T three hundred years. 
We discuss her actions, and even argue about her looks 



ELIZABETH. 437 

and manners, as if she had lived in our own time. And 
this is the reason why such divergent judgments are 
pronounced on a person who, more than any other 
ruler, united the opinions of her subjects during the 
whole of her long and agitated life. Her acts remain, 
but her judges are different. If we could throw our- 
selves with the reality of circumstance as well as the 
vividness of feeling into the period in which she moved 
and governed, we should come to truer decisions on the 
points submitted to our view. But if we look with the 
refinements of the present time, and the speculative 
niceties permissible in questions which have no direct 
bearing on our prosperity and safety, we shall see much 
to disapprove of, which escaped the notice, or even excited 
the admiration, of the people who saw what tremendous 
arbitraments were on the scale. If we were told that a 
cold-blooded individual had placed on one occasion some 
murderous weapons on a height, and then requested a 
number of his friends to stand before them, while some 
unsuspecting persons came up in that direction, and 
then, suddenly telling his companions to stand on one 
side, had sent bullets hissing and crashing through the 
gentlemen advancing to him, you would shudder with 
disgust at such atrocious cruelty, till you were told that 
the cold-blooded individual was the Duke of Wellington, 
and the advancing gentlemen the French Old Guard at 
Waterloo. And in the same way, if we read of Eliza- 
beth interfering in Scotland, domineering at home, and 
bellicose abroad, let us inquire, before we condemn, 
whether she was in her duty during those operations, — 
whether, in fact, she was resisting an assault, or capri- 
ciously and unjustifiably opening her batteries on the 
innocent and unprepared. Fiery-hearted, strong-handed 
Scotchmen are ready to fight at this time for the im- 
maculate purity and sinless martyrdom of their beau- 

31* 



438 SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 

tiful Mary, and sturdy Englishmen start up with as bold 
a countenance in defence of good Queen Bess. It is 
not to be doubted that a roll-call as numerous as that of 
Bannockburn or Flodden could be mustered on this 
quarrel of three centuries ago ; but the fight is needless. 
The points of view are so different that a verdict can 
never be given on the merits of the two personages 
principally engaged; but we think an unprejudiced 
examination of the course of Elizabeth's policy in Scot- 
land, and her treatment of her rival, will establish 
certain facts which neither party can gainsay. 

1st. From this it will result, that, to keep reformed 
England secure, it was indispensable to have reformed 
Scotland on her side. 

2d. That, in order to have Scotland either reformed 
or on her side, it was indispensable to render powerless 
a popish queen, — a queen who was supported as legiti- 
mate inheritor of England by the Pope and Philip of 
Spain, and the King and princes of France. 

3d. That Elizabeth had a right, by all the laws of self- 
preservation, to sustain by every legal and peaceable 
means that party in Scotland which was de facto the 
government of the country, and which promised to be 
most useful to the objects she had in view. Those ob- 
jects have already been named, — peace and security for 
the Protestant religion, and the honour and indepen- 
dence of the whole British realm. 

To gain these ends, who denies that she bribed and 
bullied and deceived? — that she degraded the Scottish 
nobles by alternate promises and threats, and weakened 
the Scottish crown by encouraging its enemies, both 
ecclesiastical and civil? In prudishly finding fault with 
these proceedings, we forget the Scotch, French, Spanish, 
popish, emissaries who were let loose upon England; the 
plots at home, the scowling messages from abroad ; the 



MARY OF SCOTLAND. 439 

excommunications uttered from Eome ; the massacre of 
the Protestants gloried in in France, and the vast navies 
and immense armies gathering against the devoted Isle 
from all the coasts and provinces of Spain. 

In 1568, after the defeat of the queen's party at 
Larigside, Mary threw herself on the pity and pro- 
tection of Elizabeth, and was kept in honourable safety 
for many years. She did not allow her to collect parti- 
sans for the recovery of her kingdom, nor to cabal 
against the government which had expelled her. To 
do so would not have been to shelter a fugitive, but to 
declare war on Scotland. In 1848, Louis Philippe, 
chased by the revolutionists of Paris, came over to 
England. He was kept in honourable retirement. He 
was not allowed to cabal against his former subjects, 
nor to threaten their policy. To do so would not have 
been to shelter a fugitive, but to declare war on France. 
Even in the case of the earlier Bourbons, we permitted 
no gatherings of forces on their behalf, and did not en- 
courage their followers to molest the settled govern- 
ment, — no, not when the throne of France was filled by 
an enemy and we were at deadly war with Napoleon. 
But Mary was put to death. A sad story, and very 
melancholy to read in quiet drawing-rooms with Bri- 
tannia ruling the waves and keeping all danger from 
our coasts. But in 1804, if Louis the Eighteenth or 
Charles the Tenth, instead of eating the bread of charity 
in peace, had been detected in conspiracy with our 
enemies, in corresponding with foreign emissaries, when 
a thousand flat-bottomed boats were marshalling for 
our invasion at Boulogne, and Brest and Cherbourg and 
Toulon were crowded with ships and sailors to protect 
the flotilla, it needs no great knowledge of character to 
pronounce that English "William Pitt and Scottish 
Harry Dundas would have had the royal Bourbon's 



440 SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 

head on a block, or his body on Tyburn-tree, in spite of 
all the romance and eloquence in the world. 

Mary's guilt or innocence of the charges brought 
against her in her relations with Darnley and Both well 
has nothing to do with the treatment she received 
from Elizabeth. She was not amenable to English law 
for any thing she did in Scotland, nor was she con- 
demned for any thing but treasonable practices which 
it was impossible to deny. She certainly owed submis- 
sion and allegiance to the English crown while she lived 
under its protection. Let us indulge our chivalrous 
generosity, and enjoy delightful poems in defence of 
an unfortunate and beautiful sovereign, by believing 
that the blots upon her fame were the aspersions of 
malignity and political baseness : the great fact remains, 
that it was an indispensable incident to the security of 
both the kingdoms that she should be deprived of 
authority, and finally, as the storm darkened, and de- 
rived all its perils from her conspiracies against the 
State and breaches of the law, that she should be de- 
prived of life. Far more sweeping measures were pur- 
sued and defended by the enemies of Elizabeth abroad. 
Present forever, like a skeleton at a feast, must have 
been the massacre of St. Bartholomew in the thoughts 
of every Protestant in Europe, and most vividly of all 
in those of the English queen. That great blow was 
meant to be a warning to heretics wherever they were 
found, and in olden times and more revengeful disposi- 
tions might have been an excuse for similar atrocity on 
the other side. The Bartholomew massacre and the 
Armada are the two great features of the latter part of 
this century; and they are both so well known that it 
will be sufficient to recall them in a very few words. 

This massacre was no chance-sprung event, like an 
ordinary popular rising, but had been matured for many 



ST. BARTHOLOMEW. 441 

years. The Council of Trent, which met in 1545 and 
continued its sittings till 1563, had devoted those eighteen 
years to codifying the laws of the Catholic Church. A 
definite, clear, consistent system was established, and 
acknowledged as the religious and ecclesiastical faith of 
Christendom. Men were not now left to a painful 
gathering of the sentiments and rescripts of popes and 
doctors out of varying and scattered writings. Here 
were the statutes at large, minutely indexed and easy 
of reference. From these many texts could be gathered 
which justified any method of diffusing the true belief 
or exterminating the false. And accordingly, a short 
time after the close of the Council, an interview took 
place between two personages, of very sinister augury 
for the Protestant cause. Catherine de Medicis and the 
Duke of Alva met at Bayonne in 1565. In this consul- 
tation great things were discussed; and it was decided 
by the wickedest woman and harshest man in Europe 
that government could not be safe nor religion honoured 
unless by the introduction of the Inquisition and a 
general massacre of heretics in every land. A few 
months later saw the ferocious Alva beginning his 
bloodthirsty career in the Netherlands, in which he 
boasted he had put eighteen thousand Hollanders to 
death on the scaffold in five years. Catherine also pon- 
dered his lessons in her heart, and when seven years 
had passed, and the Huguenots were still unsubdued, 
she persuaded her son Charles the Ninth that the time 
was come to establish his kingdom in righteousness by 
the indiscriminate murder of all the Protestants. An 
occasion was found in 1572, when the marriage of Henry 
of Navarre, afterwards the best-loved king of France, 
with the Princess Margaret de Yalois, held out a pros- 
pect of soothing the religious troubles, and also (which 
suited her designs better) of attracting all the heads of 



442 SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 

the Huguenot cause to Paris. Every thing turned out 
as she hoped. There had been feasts and gayeties, and 
suspicion had been thoroughly disarmed. Suddenly the 
tocsin was sounded, and the murderers let loose over all 
the town. No plea was received in extenuation of the 
deadly crime of favouring the new opinions. Hospi- 
tality, friendship, relationship, youth, sex, all were dis- 
regarded. The streets were red with blood, and the 
river choked with mutilated bodies. Upwards of seventy 
thousand were butchered in Paris alone, and the metro- 
politan example was followed in other places. The deed 
was so awful that for a while it silenced the whole of 
Europe. Some doubted, some shuddered; but Eome 
sprang up with a shout of joy when the news was con- 
firmed, and uttered prayers of thanksgiving for so great 
a victory. If it could have been possible to put every 
gainsayer to death everywhere, the triumph would have 
been complete ; but there were countries where Cathe- 
rine's dagger could not reach; and whenever her name 
was heard, and the terrible details of the massacre were 
known, undying hatred of the Church which encouraged 
such iniquity mingled with the feelings of pity and 
alarm. For no one henceforth could feel safe. The 
Huguenots were under the highest protection known to 
the heart of man. They were guests, and they were 
taken unawares in the midst of the rejoicings of a 
marriage. Eome lost more by the massacre than the 
Protestants. People looked round and saw the butcher- 
ies in the Netherlands, the slaughters in Paris, the 
tortures in the Inquisition, and over all, rioting in hopes 
of recovered dominion, supported by his priests and 
Dominicans, a Pope who plainly threatened a repetition 
of such scenes wherever his power was acknowledged. 
Germany, the Netherlands, England, Scotland, and the 
Northern nations, were lost to the Church of Eome 



MARY EXECUTED. 443 

more surely by the scaffold and crimes which professed 
to bring her aid, than by any other cause. Elizabeth 
was now the accepted champion and leader of the Pro- 
testants, and on her all the malice of the baffled Eomanists 
was turned. To weaken, to dethrone or murder the 
English heretic was the praiseworthiest of deeds. 

But one great means of distracting England from her 
onward course was now removed. In former days 
Scotland would have been let loose upon her unguarded 
flanks; but by this time the genius of Knox, running 
parallel with the efforts of the Southern reformers, had 
raised a religious feeling which responded to the English 
call. Scotland, freed from an oppressive priesthood, did 
manful battle at the side of her former enemy. Eliza- 
beth was kept safe by the joint hatred the nations enter- 
tained to Eome, and, as regarded foreigners, the Union 
had already taken place. On one sure ground, however, 
those foreigners could still build their hopes. Mary, 
conscientious in her religion, and embittered in her dis- 
like, was still alive, to be the rallying-point for every 
discontented cry and to represent the old causes, — the 
legitimate descent and the true faith. The greatest 
circumspection would have been required to keep her 
conduct from suspicion in these embarrassing circum- 
stances. Eut she was still as thoughtless as in her 
happier days, and exposed herself to legal inquiries by 
the unguardedness of her behaviour. The wise coun- 
sellors of Elizabeth saw but one way to put an end to all 
those fears and expectations ; and Mary, after due trial, 
L' B o'»* was condemned and executed. Hope was now 

a.d. 1587. r 

at an end; but revenge remained, and the great 

Colossus of the Papacy bestirred himself to punish the 

sacrilegious usurper. Philip the Second was still the 

most Catholic of kings. More stern and bigoted than 

when he had tried to restrain the burning zeal of Mary 



444 SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 

of England, he was resolved to restore by force a re- 
volted people to the Chair of St. Peter and exact venge- 
ance for the slights and scorns which had rankled in his 
heart from the date of his ill-omened visit. He pre- 
pared all his forces for the glorious attempt. Nothing 
could have been devised more calculated to bring all 
English hearts more closely to their queen. Every 
report of a fresh squadron joining the fleets already 
assembled for the invasion called forth more zeal in be- 
half of the reformed Church and the undaunted Eliza- 
beth. Scotland also held some vessels ready to assist 
her sister in this great extremity, and lined her shores 
with Presbyterian spearmen. Community of danger 
showed more clearly than ever that safety lay in combi- 
nation. Chains, we know, were brought over in those 
missionary galleys, and all the apparatus of torture, 
with smiths to set them to work. But the smiths and 
the chains never made good, their landing on British 
ground. The ships covered all the narrow sea ; but the 
wind blew, and they were scattered. It was perhaps 
better, as a warning and a lesson, that the principal 
cause of the Spaniard's disaster was a storm. If it 
had been fairly inflicted on them in open battle, the 
superior seamanship or numbers or discipline of the 
enemy might have been pleaded. But there must have 
mingled something more depressing than the mere 
sorrow of defeat when Philip received his discomfited 
admiral with the words, "We cannot blame you for 
what has haj>pened: we cannot struggle against the 
will of God." 



SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 



lUmcjs of ^France, iftmgsof IBnglantranti Scotland 



A.D. 

Henry IV. — (cont.) 
1610. Louis XIII. 
1643. Louis XIV. 

ISmpnors of <§erman#< 

Eodolph II. —{cont.) 
1612. Matthias. 
1619. Ferdinand II. 
1637. Ferdinand III. 
1658. Leopold I. 



A.D. 

Elizx\beth. — {cont.) 
{House of Stuart.) 

1603. James I. 

1625. Charles I. 

1649. Commonwealth. 

1660. Charles II. 

1685. James II. 

1689. William III. and Mary. 

3&mgs of Spain. 

Philip III. — {cont.) 
1621. Philip IV. 
1665. Charles II. 

IBtsttngutsfjeti JHen. 

Bacon, Milton, Locke, Corneille, Racine, Moliere, Kepler, 
(1571-1630,) Boyle, (1627-1691,) Bossuet, (1627-1704,) New- 
ton, (1642-1727,) Burnet, (1643-1715,) Bayle, (1647-1706,) 
Co^de, Turenne, (1611-1675,) Marlborough, (1650-1722.) 



THE SEVENTEENTH CENTUBY. 

ENGLISH REBELLION AND REVOLUTION DESPOTISM OF 

LOUIS THE FOURTEENTH. 

We are apt to suppose that progress and innovation 
are so peculiarly the features of these latter times that 
it is only in them that a man of more than ordinary 
length of life has witnessed any remarkable change. 
We meet with men still alive who were acquainted with 
Franklin and Voltaire, who have been presented at the 
court of Louis the Sixteenth and have visited President 
Pierce at the White House. But the period we have 
now to examine is quite as varied in the contrasts pre- 
sented by the duration of a lifetime as in any other age 
of the world. Of this we shall take a French chronicler 
as an example, — a man who was as greedy of news, and 
as garrulous in relating it, as Froissart himself, but who 
must take a very inferior rank to that prose minstrel 
of "gentle blood," as he limited his researches princi- 
pally to the scandals which characterized his time. 
We mean the truth-speaking libeller Brantome. This 
man died within a year or two of Shakspeare, 
and yet had accompanied Mary to Scotland, 
and given that poetical account of the voyage from 
Calais, when she sat in the stern of the vessel with her 
eyes fixed on the receding shore, and said, "Adieu, 
France, adieu ! I shall never see you more ;" and again, 
on the following morning, bending her looks across the 
water when land was no longer to be seen, and exclaim- 
ing, " Adieu, France ! I shall never see you more." The 

447 



448 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

mere comparison of these two things — the return of 
Mary to her native kingdom, torn at that time with all 
the struggles of anarchy and distress, and the death of 
the greatest of earth's poets, rich and honoured, in 
his well-built house at Stratford-on-Avon — suggests a 
strange contrast between the beginning of Brantome's 
literary career and its close : the events filling up the 
interval are like the scarcely-discernible heavings in a 
dark and tumultuous sea, — a storm perpetually raging, 
and waves breaking upon every shore. In his own 
country, cruelty and demoralization had infected all 
orders in the State, till murder, and the wildest pro- 
fligacy of manners, were looked on without a shudder. 
Brantome attended the scanty and unregretted funeral 
of Henry the Third, the last of the house of Yalois, 
who was stabbed by the monk Jacques Clement for 
faltering in his allegiance to the Church. A sentence 
had been pronounced at Borne against the miserable 
king, and the fanatic's dagger was ready. Sixtus the 
Fifth, in full consistory, declared that the regicide was 
" comparable, as regards the salvation of the world, to 
the incarnation and the resurrection, and that the 
courage of the youthful Jacobin surpassed that of 
Eleazar and Judith." " That Pope," says Chateau- 
briand, the Catholic historian of France, " had too little 
political conviction, and too much genius, to be sincere 
in these sacrilegious comparisons ; but it was of import- 
ance to him to encourage the fanatics who were ready 
to murder kings in the name of the papal power." 
Brantome had seen the issuing of a bull containing the 
same penalties against Elizabeth, the death of Mary on 
the scaffold, and the failure of the Armada. After the 
horrors of the religious wars, from the conspiracy of 
Amboise in 1560 to the publication of the edict of tole- 
ration given at Nantes in 1598, he had seen the com- 



EAST INDIA COMPANY. 449 

paratively peaceful days of Henry the Fourth, till fanati- 
cism again awoke a suspicion of a return to his original 
Protestant leanings, as shown in his opposition to the 
house of Austria, and Ravaillac renewed the meritorious 
work of Clement in 1610. Last of all, the spectator of 
all these changes saw England and Scotland forevei 
united under one crown, and the first rise of the master 
of the modern policy of Europe, for in the year of 
Brantome's death a young priest was appointed Secre- 
tary of State in France, whom men goon gazed on with 
fear and wonder as the great Cardinal Eichelieu. 

In England the alterations were as great and striking. 
After the troubled years from Elizabeth's accession to 
the Armada, a period of rest and progress came. In- 
terests became spread over the whole nation, and did 
not depend so exclusively on the throne. Wisdom and 
good feeling made Elizabeth's crown, in fact, what laws 
and compacts have made her successors', — a constitu- 
tional sovereign's. She ascertained the sentiments of 
her people almost without the intervention of Parlia- 
ment, and was more a carrier-through of the national 
will than the originator of absolute decrees. The 
moral battles of a nation in pursuit of some momentous 
object like religious or political freedom bring forth 
great future crops, as fields are enriched on which 
mighty armies have been engaged. The fertilizing 
influence extends in every direction, far and near. If, 
therefore, the intellectual harvest that followed the 
final rejection of the Pope and crowning defeat of the 
Spaniard included Shakspeare and Bacon, and a host of 
lesser but still majestic names, we may venture also to 
remark, on the duller and more prosaic side of the ques- 
tion, that in the first year of the seventeenth century a 
patent was issued by which a commercial speculation 
attained a substantive existence, for the East India 

2 D 38* 



460 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

Company was founded, with a stock of seventy-two 
thousand pounds, and a fleet of four vessels took their 
way from the English harbours, on their first voyage to 
the realm where hereafter their employers, who thus 
began as merchant adventurers, were to rule as kings. 
The example set by these enterprising men was followed 
by high and low. During the previous century people 
had been too busy with their domestic and religious dis- 
putes to pay much attention to foreign exploration. 
They were occupied with securing their liberties from 
the tyranny of Henry the Eighth and their lives from 
the truculence of Mary. Then the plots perpetually 
formed against Elizabeth, by domestic treason and 
foreign levy, kept their attention exclusively on home- 
affairs. But when the State was settled and religion 
secure, the long-pent-up activity of the national mind 
found vent in distant expeditions. A chivalrous con- 
tempt of danger, and poetic longing for new adventure, 
mingled with the baser attractions of those maritime 
wanderings. The families of gentle blood in England, 
instead of sending their sons to waste their lives in pur- 
suit of knightly fame in the service of foreign states, 
equipped them for far higher enterprises, and sent them 
forth to gather the riches of unknown lands beyond the 
sea. Eomantic rumours were rife in every manor- 
house of the strange sig its and inexhaustible wealth to 
be gained by undaunted seamanship and judicious treat- 
ment of the natives of yet-unexplored dominions. Spain 
and Portugal had their kingdoms, but the extent of 
America was great enough for all. Islands were every- 
where to be found untouched as yet by the foot of 
European; and many a winter's night was spent in 
talking over the possible results of sailing up some of 
the vast rivers that came down like bursting oceans 
from the far-inland regions to which nobody had as yet 



EXPEDITIONS. 451 

ascended, — the people and cities that lay upon their 
banks, the gold and jewels that paved the common soil. 
Towards the end of Elizabeth's reign, these imaginings 
had grown into sufficing motives of action, and gentle- 
men were ready from all the ports of the kingdom to 
sail on their adventurous voyages. In addition to the 
chance those gallant mariners had of realizing their 
day-dreams by the tedious methods of discovery and 
exploration, there was always the prospect of making 
prize of a galleon of Spain ; for at all times, however 
friendly the nations might be in the European waters, a 
war was carried on beyond the Azores. Not altogether 
lost, therefore, was the old knightly spirit of peril-seek- 
ing and adventure in those commercial and geographical 
speculations. There were articles of merchandise in 
the hold, gaudy-coloured cloths, and bead ornaments, 
and wretched looking-glasses, besides brass and iron ; 
but all round the captain's cabin were arranged swords 
and pistols, boarding-pikes, and other implements of 
fight. Guns also of larger size peeped out of the port- 
holes, and the crew were chosen as much with a view 
to warlike operations as to the ordinary duties of the 
ship. The Spaniards had made their way into the 
Pacific, and had established large settlements on the 
shores of Chili and Peru. Scenes which have been 
reacted at the diggings in modern times took place 
where the Europeans fixed their seat, and ships loaded 
with the precious metals found their way home, exposed 
to all the perils of storm and war. Drake had pounced 
upon several of their galleys and despoiled them of their 
precious cargo. Cavendish, a gentleman of good estate 
in Suffolk, had followed in his wake, and, after forcing 
his way through the Straits of Magellan, had reached 
the shores of California itself and there captured a 
Spanish vessel freighted with a vast amount of gold. 



452 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

All these adventures of the expiring sixteenth century- 
became traditions and ballads of the young seventeenth. 
Raleigh, the most accomplished gentleman of his time, 
gave the glory of his example to the maritime career, 
and all the oceans were alive with British ships. While 
Raleigh and others of the upper class were carrying on 
a sort of cultivated crusade against the monopoly of the 
Spaniards, others of a less aristocratic position were 
busied in the more regular paths of commerce. We 
have seen the formation of the India Company in 1600. 
Our competitors, the Dutch, fitted out fleets on a larger 
scale, and established relations of trade and friendship 
with the natives of Polynesia and JSTew Holland, and 
even of Java and India. But the zeal of the public in 
trading-speculations was not only shown in those well- 
conducted expeditions to lands easily accessible and 
already known : a company was established for the pur- 
pose of opening out the African trade, and a com- 
mercial voyage was undertaken to no less a place than 
Timbuctoo by a gallant pair of seamen of the names of 
Thomson and Jobson. It was not long before these 
efforts at honest international communication, and even 
the exploits of the Drakes and Cavendishes, who acted 
under commissions from the queen, degenerated into 
lawless piracy and the golden age of the. Buccaneers. 
The policy of Spain was complete monopoly in her own 
hands, and a refusal of foreign intercourse worthy of 
the potentates of China and Japan. All access was pro- 
hibited to the flags of foreign nations, and the natural re- 
sult followed. Adventurous voyagers made their appear- 
ance with no flag at all, or with the hideous emblem of a 
death's head emblazoned on their standard, determined to 
trade peaceably if possible, but to trade whether peaceably 
or not. The Spanish colonists were not indisposed to 
exchange their commodities with those of the new- 



EMIGRATION. 458 

comers, but the law was imperative. The Buccaneers, 
therefore, proceeded to help themselves to what they 
wanted by force, and at length came to consider them- 
selves an organized estate, governed by their own laws, 
and qualified to make treaties like any other established 
and recognised power. Cuba had been nearly depopu- 
lated by the cruelties and fanaticism of its Spanish 
masters, and was seized on by the Buccaneers. From 
this rich and beautiful island the pirate-barks dashed 
out upon any Spanish sail which might be leaving the 
mainland. Commanding the G-ulf of Mexico, and with 
the power of crossing the Isthmus of Panama by a 
rapid march, those redoubtable bandits held the treasure- 
lands of the Spaniards in terrible subjection. And up 
to the commencement even of the eighteenth century 
the frightful spectacle was presented of a powerful con- 
federacy of the wildest and most dissolute villains in 
Europe domineering over the most frequented seas in 
the world, and filling peaceful voyagers, and even well- 
armed men-of-war, with alarm by their unsparing 
cruelty, and atrocities which it curdles the blood to 
think of. 

Eastward as far as China, westward to the islands 
and shores of the great Pacific, up the rivers of Africa, 
and even among the forests of New Holland and Tas- 
mania, the swarms of European adventurers succeeded 
each other without cessation. The marvel is, that, with 
such ceaseless activity, any islands, however remote or 
small, were left for the discovery of after-times. But 
the tide of English emigration rolled towards the main- 
land of North America with a steadier flow than to any 
other quarter. The idea of a northwest passage to 
India had taken possession of men's minds, and hardy 
seamen had alreadj^ braved the horrors of a polar 
winter, and set examples of fortitude and patience 



454 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

which their successors, from Behrens to Kane, have 
so nobly followed. But the fertile plains of Virginia, 
and the navigable streams of the eastern shore, were 
more alluring to the peaceful and unenterprising settlers, 
whose object was to find a new home and carry on a 
lucrative trade with the native Indians. In 1607, a 
colony, properly so called, — for it had made provision 
for permanent settlement, and consisted of a hundred 
and ten persons, male and female, — arrived at the mouth 
of the Chesapeake. The river Powhatan was eagerly 
explored; and at a point sufficiently far up to be secure 
from sudden attack from the sea, and on an isthmus 
easily defended from native assault, they pitched their 
tents on a spot which was hereafter known as James- 
town and is still honoured as the earliest of the 
American settlements. Our neighbour Holland was 
not behindhand either in trade or colonization, and 
equally with England was excited to fresh efforts by its 
recovered liberty and independence. In all directions 
of intellectual and physical employment those two 
States went boundingly forward at the head of the move- 
ment. The absolute monarchies lay lazily by, and 
relied on the inertness of their mass for their defence 
against those active competitors; and Spain, an un- 
wieldy bulk, showed the intimate connection there will 
always exist between liberal institutions at home and 
active progress abroad. The sun never set on the 
dominions of the Spanish crown, but the life of the 
people was crushed out of them by the weight of the In- 
quisition and despotism. The United Provinces and com- 
bined Great Britain had shaken off both those petrify- 
ing institutions, and Englishmen, Scotchmen, and Dutch- 
men were ploughing up every sea, presenting them- 
selves at the courts of strange-coloured potentates, in 
regions whose existence had been unknown a few years 



MERRY ENGLAND. 455 

before, and gradually accustoming the wealth and com- 
merce of the world to find their way to London and 
Amsterdam. 

To go from these views of hardihood and enterprise, 
from the wild heaving of unruly vigour which animated 
the traffickers and tyrants of the main, to the peaceful 
and pedantic domestic reign of James the First, shows 
the two extremes of European character at this time. 
The English people were not more than four millions in 
number, but they were the happiest and most favoured 
of all the nations. This was indeed the time, 

" Ere England's woes began, 
When every rood of land maintain'd its man ;" 

for we have seen how the division of the great monastic 
properties had created a new order in the State. All 
accounts concur in describing the opening of this cen- 
tury as the period of the greatest physical prosperity 
of the body of the people. A great deal of dulness 
and unrefinement there must still have been in the 
boroughs, where such sage officials as Dogberry dis- 
played their pomp and ignorance, — a great deal of 
clownishness and coarseness in country-places, where 
Audreys and Autolycuses were to be found; but among 
townsmen and peasantry there was none of the grind- 
ing poverty which a more unequal distribution of 
national wealth creates. There were great Whitsun 
ales, and dancings round the Maypole ; feasts on village 
greens, and a spirit of rude and personal independence, 
which became mellowed into manly self-respect when 
treated with deference by the higher ranks, the old 
hereditary gentry and the retired statesmen of Queen 
Bess, but bristled up in insolence and rebellion when 
the governing power thwarted its wishes, or fanaticism 
soured it with the bitter waters of polemic strife. The 
sturdy Englishman who doffed his hat to the squire, and 



450 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

joined his young lord in sports upon the green, in the 
beginning of James's reign, was the same stout-hearted, 
strong-willed individual who stiffened into Puritanism 
and contempt of all earthly authorities in the unlovely, 
unloving days of the Rump and Cromwell. Nor should 
we miss the great truth which lies hidden under the rigid 
forms of that period, — that the same noble qualities which 
characterized the happy yeoman and jocund squire of 
1620 — their earnestness, energy, and intensity of home 
affections — were no less existent in their ascetic short- 
haired descendants of 1650. The brimfulness of life 
which overflowed into expeditions against the Spaniards 
in Peru, and unravellings of the tangled rivers of Africa, 
and trackings of the wild bears among the ice-floes of 
Hudson's Bay, took a new direction when the century 
reached the middle of its course, and developed itself in 
the stormy discussions of the contending sects and the 
blood and misery of so many battle-fields. How was this 
great change worked on the English mind? How was it 
that the long-surviving soldier, courtier, landholder, of 
Queen Elizabeth saw his grandson grow up into the hard- 
featured, heavy -browed, keen-sworded Ironside of Oliver l 
A squire who ruined himself in loyal entertainments to 
King James on his larder-and-cellar-emptying journey 
from Edinburgh to London in 1603 may have lived to 
see his son, and son's son, rejoicing with unholy triumph 
over the victory of JSTaseby in 1644 and the death of 
Charles in 1649. 

Great causes must have been at work to produce this 
astonishing change, and some of them it will not be 
difficult to point out. Perhaps, indeed, the prosperity 
we have described may itself have contributed to the 
alteration in the English ways of thought. While the 
nation was trampled on by Henry the Eighth, with 
property and life insecure and poverty universally dif- 



CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 



457 



fused, or even while it was guided by the strong hand 
of Elizabeth, it had neither power nor inclination to 
examine into its rights. The rights of a starving and 
oppressed population are not very great, even in its own 
eyes. It is the well-fed, law-protected, enterprising 
citizen who sees the value of just and settled govern- 
ment, because the blessings he enjoys depend upon its 
continuance. The mind of the nation had been pauper- 
ized along with its body by the life of charitable de- 
pendence it had led at the doors of church and monas- 
tery in the olden time. It little mattered to a gaping 
crowd expecting the accustomed dole whether the great 
man in London was a tyrannical king or not. They did 
not care whether he dismissed his Parliaments or cut 
off the heads of his nobility. They still found their 
"bit and sup," and saw the King, and Parliament, and 
nobility, united in obedience to the Church. But when 
this debasing charity was discontinued, independence 
came on. The idle hanger-on of the religious house 
became a cottager, and worked on his own land; by 
industry he got capital enough to take some additional 
acres ; and the man of the next generation had forgotten 
the low condition he sprang from, and had so sharp- 
ened his mind by the theological quarrels of the time 
that he began to be able to comprehend the question of 
general politics. He saw, as* every population and po- 
tentate in Europe saw with equal clearness, that the 
question of civil freedom was indissolubly connected 
with the relation between Church and State; he per- 
ceived that the extent of divergence from the old faith 
regulated in a great measure the spirit, and even the 
constitution, of government where it took place, — that 
adhesion to Eome meant absolutism and dependence, 
that Calvinism had a strong bias towards the republican 
form, and that the Church he had helped to establish 

39 



458 



SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 



was calculated to fill up the ground between those two 
extremes, and be the religious representative of a State 
as liberal as Geneva by its attention to the interests of 
all, and as monarchical as Spain by its loyalty to an 
hereditary crown. Now, the middle ground in great 
and agitating affairs is always the most difficult to 
maintain. Both sides make it their battle-field, and try 
to win it to themselves ; and according as one assailant 
seems on the point of carrying his object, the defender 
of that disputed territory has to lean towards the other. 
Both parties are offended at the apparent inconsistency; 
and we are therefore not to be surprised if we find the 
Church accused of looking to both the hostile camps in 
turn. 

James was a fatal personage to every cause he under- 
took to defend. He had neither the strength of will of 
Henry, nor the proud consistency of Elizabeth; but he 
had the arrogance and presumption of both. Questions 
which the wise queen was afraid to touch, and left to the 
ripening influence of time, this blustering arguer dragged 
into premature discussion, stripped them of all their 
dignity by the frivolousness of the treatment he gave 
them, and disgusted all parties by the harshness and 
rapidity of his partial decisions. Every step he took in 
the quelling of religious dissension by declarations in 
favour of proscription and authority which would have 
endeared him to Gregory the Seventh, he accompanied 
with some frightful display of his absolutist tendencies 
in civil affairs. The same man who roared down the 
modest claims of a thousand of the clergy who wished 
some further modification of the Book of Common 
Prayer threw recusant members of Parliament into 
prison, persecuted personal enemies to death, witli 
scarcely a form of law, punished refractory towns with 
loss of franchises and privileges, and made open declara- 



JAMES I. 459 

tion of his unlimited power over the lives and properties 
of all his subjects. People saw this unvarying alliance 
between his polemics and his politics, and began to con- 
sider seriously whether the comforts their trade and in- 
dustry had given them could be safe under a Church 
calling itself reformed, but protected by such a king. 
If he was only suspected in England, in his own country 
he was fully known. Dearer to James would have been 
a hundred bishops and cardinals seated in conclave in 
Holyrood than a Presbyterian Synod praying against 
his policy in the High Kirk. He had even written to 
the Pope with offers of accommodation and reconcile- 
ment, and made no secret of his individual and official 
disgust at the levelling ideas of those grave followers of 
Knox and Calvin. Those grave followers of Knox and 
Calvin, however, were not unknown on the south side 
of the Tweed. The intercourse between the countries 
was not limited to the hungry gentry who followed 
James on his accession. A community of interest and 
feeling united the more serious of the Reformers, and 
visits and correspondence were common between them. 
But, while a regard for their personal freedom and the 
security of their wealth attracted the attention of the 
English middle class to the proceedings of King James, 
events were going on in foreign lands which had an 
immense effect on the development of the anti-mon- 
archic, anti-episcopal spirit at home. These events 
have not been sufficiently considered in this relation, 
and we have been too much in the habit of lookino- at 

O 

our English doings in those momentous years, — from the 
end of James's reign to the Eestoration, — as if Britain 
had continued as isolated from her Continental neigh- 
bours as before the Norman Conquest. But a careful 
comparison of dates and actions will show how intimate 
the connection had become between the European States, 



400 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

and how instantaneously the striking of a chord at 
Prague or Yienna thrilled through the general heart in 
Edinburgh and London. 

The Reformation, after achieving its independence 
and equality at the Treaty of Augsburg in 1555, had 
made great though silent progress. Broken off in Ger- 
many into two parties, the Lutheran and the Calvinist, 
who hated each- other, as usual, in exact proportion to 
the smallness of their difference, the union was still 
kept up between them as regarded their antagonism to 
the Papists. With all three denominations, the religious 
part of the question had fallen into terrible abeyance. 
It was now looked on by the leaders entirely as a matter 
of personal advancement and political rule. In this 
pursuit the fanaticism which is generally limited to 
theology took the direction of men's political conduct; 
and there were enthusiasts among all the sects, who saw 
visions, and dreamed dreams, about the succession to 
thrones and the raising of armies, as used to happen in 
more ancient times about the bones of martyrs and the 
beatification of saints. The great object of Protestants 
and Catholics was to obtain a majority in the college of 
the Prince Electors by whom the Empire was bestowed. 
This consisted of the seven chief potentates of Ger- 
many, of whom four were secular, — the King of Bo- 
hemia, the Count Palatine of the Ehine, the Duke of 
Saxony, and the Marquis of Brandenburg; and three 
ecclesiastic, — the Archbishops of Mentz, Treves, and 
Cologne. The majority was naturally secured to the 
Eomanists by the official adhesion of these last. But 
it chanced that the Elector of Cologne fell violently in 
love with Agnes of Mansfeldt, a canoness of Gerrestein ; 
and having of course studied the history of our Henry 
the Eighth and Anne Boleyn, he determined to follow his 
example, and offered the fair canoness his hand. He 



DIVISION AMONG THE PROTESTANTS. 461 

was unwilling, however, to offer his hand without the 
Electoral crozier, and, by the advice of his friends, and 
with the promised support of many of the Protestant 
rulers, he retained his ecclesiastical dignity and made 
the beautiful Agnes his wife. This would not have been 
of much consequence in a lower rank, for many of the 
cathedral dignitaries in Cologne and other places had 
retained their offices after changing their faith; but all 
Germany was awake to the momentous nature of this 
transaction, for it would have conveyed a majority of 
the Electoral voices to the Protestants and opened the 
throne of the empire itself to a Protestant prince. Such, 
however, was the strength at that time of the opposition 
to Rome, that all the efforts of the Catholics would have 
been ineffectual to prevent this ruinous arrangement 
but for a circumstance which threw division into the 
Protestant camp. G-ebhard had adhered to the Calvin- 
istic branch of the Reformation, and the Lutherans 
hated him with a deadlier hatred than the Pope himself. 
With delight they saw him outlawed by the Emperor 
and excommunicated by Eome, his place supplied by a 
Prince of Bavaria, who was elected by the Chapter of 
Cologne to protect them from their apostate archbishop, 
and the head of the house of Austria strengthened by 
the consolidation of his Electoral allies and the unap- 
peasable dissensions of his enemies. While petty in- 
terests and the narrowest quarrels of sectarianism 
divided the Protestants, and while the Electors and 
other princes who had adopted their theological opinions 
were doubtful of the political results of religious free- 
dom, and many had waxed cold, and others were discon- 
tented with the small extent of the liberation from 
ancient trammels they had yet obtained, a very different 
spectacle was presented on the other side. Popes and 
Jesuits were heartily and unhesitatingly at work. "~No 

39* 



462 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

cold, faint-hearted doubtings teased them." Their ob- 
ject was incommoded by no refinements or verbal differ- 
ences ; they were determined to assert their old supre- 
macy, — to trample out every vestige of resistance to 
their power; and they entered upon the task without 
scruple or remorse. Ferdinand the Emperor, the prop 
and champion of the Eomish cause, was as sincere and 
as unpitying as Dominic. When he had been nomi- 
nated King Elect of Bohemia, in 1598, while yet in his 
twentieth year, his first thought was the future use he' 
might make of his authority in the extermination of the 
Protestant faith. The Jesuits, by whom he was trained 
from his earliest years, never turned out a more hopeful 
pupil. His ambition would have been, if he had had it 
in his power, to become a follower of Loyola himself; 
but, as he was condemned by fate to the lower office of 
the first of secular princes, he determined to employ all 
its power at the dictation of his teachers. He went a 
pilgrimage to Loretto, and, bowing before the miraculous 
image of the Yirgin, promised to reinstate the true 
Church in its unquestioned supremacy, and bent all his 
thoughts to the fulfilment of his vow. Two-thirds of 
his subjects in his hereditary states were Protestant, but 
he risked all to attain his object. He displaced their 
clergy, and banished all who would not conform. He 
introduced Catholics from foreign countries to supply 
the waste of population, and sent armed men to destroy 
the newly-erected schools and churches of the hateful 
heretics. This man was crowned King of Bohemia in 
1618, and Emperor of Germany in the following year. 

The attention of the British public had been particu- 
larly directed to German interests for the six years pre- 
ceding this date, by the marriage of Frederick, Elector 
Palatine of the Ehine, with Elizabeth, the graceful and 
accomplished daughter of King James. Frederick was 



BEHAVIOUR OF JAMES I. 403 

young and ambitious, and was endeared to the English 
people as leader of the Protestant cause against the 
overweening pretensions of the house of Austria. That 
house was still the most powerful in Europe; for though 
the Spanish monarchy was held by another branch, foi 
all the purposes of despotism and religion its weight 
was thrown into the same scale. Spanish soldiers, and 
all the treasures of America, were still at the command 
of the Empire; and perhaps Catholicism was rather 
strengthened than weakened by the adherence of two 
of the greatest sovereigns in the world, instead of 
having the personal influence of only one, as in the 
reign of Charles the Fifth. All the Elector's movements 
were followed with affectionate interest by the subjects 
of his father-in-law; but James himself disapproved of 
opposition being offered to the wildest excesses of royal 
prerogative either in himself or any other anointed 
ruler. Besides this, he was particularly hostile to the 
young champion's religious principles, for the latter was 
attached to the Calvinistic or unepiscopal party. James 
declined to give him any aid in maintaining his right to 
the crown of Bohemia, to which he was elected by the 
Protestant majority of that kingdom on the accession 
' „ of Ferdinand to the Empire, and managed to 

A.D. 1619. x ' to 

show his feelings in the most offensive manner, 
by oppressing such of Frederick's co-religionists as he 
found in any part of his dominions. The advocates of 
peace at any price have praised the behaviour of the 
king in this emergency; but it maybe doubted whether 
an energetic display of English power at this time 
might not have prevented the great and cruel reaction 
against freedom and Protestantism which the victory 
of the bigoted Ferdinand over his neglected competitor 
introduced. A riot, accompanied with violence against 
the Catholic authorities, was the beginning of the 



464 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

troubles in Bohemia; and Ferdinand, as if to explain 
his conduct to the satisfaction of James, published a 
manifesto, which might almost be believed to have been 
the production of that Solomon of the North. "If 
sovereign power," he says, " emanates from G-od, these 
atrocious deeds must proceed from the devil, and there- 
fore must draw down divine punishment." This logic 
was unanswerable at Whitehall, and the work of exter- 
mination went on. Feeble efforts were forced upon the 
unwilling father-in-law ; for all the chivalry of England 
was wild with sympathy and admiration of the Bohe- 
mian queen. Hundreds of gallant gentlemen passed 
over to swell the Protestant ranks ; and when they re- 
turned and told the tale of all the horrors they had 
seen, the remorseless vengeance of the triumphant 
Church, and all the threatenings with which Rome and 
the Empire endeavoured to terrify the nations which 
had rebelled against their yoke, Puritanism, or resist- 
ance to the slightest approach towards Poj>ery either in 
essentials or externals, became patriotism and self- 
defence ; and at this very time, while men's minds were 
inflamed with the descriptions of the torturings and 
executions which followed the battle of Prague in 1620, 
and the devastation and depopulation of Bohemia, 
James took the opportunity of forcing the Episcopal 
form of government on the Scottish Presbyterians. 

" The greatest matter," he says; in an address to the 
prelates of the reluctant dioceses, — "the greatest matter 
the Puritans had to object against the Church govern- 
ment was, that your proceedings were warranted by no 
law, which now by this last Parliament is cutted short. 
The sword is now put in your hands. Go on, therefore, 
to use it, and let it rest no longer till ye have perfected 
the service trusted to you ; or otherwise we must use it 
both against you and them." While the people of both 



CONDUCT OF CHARLES I. 465 

nations were willing to sink their polemic differences of 
Calvinist and Anglican in one great attempt to deliver 
the Protestants in Germany from the power of the house 
of Austria, — while for this purpose they would have 
voted taxes and raised armies with the heartiest good 
will ; — the king's whole attention was bestowed on a set 
of manoeuvres for the obtaining a Spanish-Austrian 
bride for his son. To gain this he would have humbled 
himself to the lowest acts. At a whisper from Madrid, 
he interfered with the German war, to the detriment of 
his own daughter; and England perceived that his 
ineradicable love of power and hatred of freedom had 
blinded him to national interests and natural affections. 
If we follow the whole career of James, and a great 
portion of his successor's, we shall see the same remark- 
able coincidence between the events in England and 
abroad, — unpopularity of the king, produced by his 
apparent lukewarmness in the general Protestant cause 
as much as by his arbitrary acts at home. Whatever 
the nation desired, the king opposed. When Gustavus 
Adolphus, the Lion of the North, began his triumphant 
career in 1630, and re-established the fallen fortunes of 
Protestantism, Charles concluded a dishonourable peace 
with Spain, without a single provision in favour of the 
Protestants of the German States, and allowed the 
Popish Cardinal Richelieu first to consolidate his forces 
by an unsparing oppression of the Huguenots in France, 
and then to almost compensate for his harshness by a 
gallant support of the Swedish hero in his struggle 
against the Austrian power. 

There was no longer the same content and happiness 
in the towns and country districts as there had been at 
the commencement of the century. Men had looked 
with contempt and dislike on the proceedings of James's 
court, — his coarse buffoonery, and disgraceful patronage 
2E 



460 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

of a succession of worthless favourites ; and they con- 
tinued to look, not indeed with contempt, but with 
increased dislike and suspicion, on the far purer court 
and dignified manners of his unfortunate son. A 
French princess, though the daughter of Henry the 
Fourth, was regarded as an evil omen for the continu- 
ance of good, government or religious progress. Her 
attendants, lay and clerical, were not unjustly con- 
sidered spies, and advisers with interests hostile to the 
popular tendencies. And all this time went on the 
unlucky coincidences which distinguished this reign, — 
of Catholic cruelties in foreign lands, and approaches to 
the Catholic ceremonial in the reformed Church. While 
Tilly, the remorseless general of the Emperor, was 
letting loose the most ferocious army which ever served 
under a national standard upon the inhabitants of 
Magdeburg, heaping into the history of that miserable 
assault all the sufferings that " horror e'er conceived or 
fancy feigned," — and while the echo of that awful 
butchery, which has not yet died out of the German 
heart, was making sorrowful every fireside in what was 
once merry England, — the king's advisers pursued their 
blind way, torturing their opponents with knife and 
burning-brand upon the pillory, flogging gentlemen 
nearly to death upon the streets, and consecrating 
churches with an array of surplice, and censer, and 
processions, and organ-blowings, which would have done 
honour to St. Peter's at Eome. People saw a lamentable 
connection between the excesses of Catholic cruelty and 
the tendency in our sober establishment to Catholic 
traditions, and became fanatical in their detestation of 
the simplest forms. 

In ordinary times the wise man considers mere forms 
as almost below his notice; but there are periods when 
the emblem is of as much importance as the thing it 



POLITICAL AND RELIGIOUS PARTIES. 467 

typifies. Church ceremonies, and gorgeous robes, and 
magnificent worship, were accepted by both parties as 
the touchstone of their political and religious opinions. 
Laud pushed aside the Archbishop of Glasgow, who 
stood at Charles's right hand on his visit to Scotland in 
1633, on the express ground that he had not the ortho- 
dox fringe upon his habit, — a ridiculous ground for so 
open an insult, if it had not had an inner sense. The 
Archbishop of Glasgow professed himself a moderate 
Churchman by the plainness of his dress, and Laud 
accepted it as a defiance. Meanwhile the essential in- 
significance of the symbol threw an air of ridicule over 
the importance attached to it. Dull-minded men, who 
had not the faculty of seeing how deep a question may 
lie in a simple exposition of it, or frivolous men, who 
could not rise to the real earnestness which enveloped 
those discussions, were scandalized at the persistency of 
Laud in enforcing his fancies, and the obstinacy of a 
great portion of the clergy and people in resisting them. 
But the Puritans, with clearer eyes, saw that a dance, 
according to proclamation, on the village green on Sun- 
day, meant not a mere desecration of the Sabbath, but 
a crusade against the rights of conscience and an asser- 
tion of arbitrary power. Altars instead of communion- 
tables in churches meant not merely a restoration of the 
Popish belief in the real sacrifice of the mass, but a 
placing of the king above the law, and the abrogation 
of all liberty. They could not at this time persuade the 
nation of these things. The nation, for the most part, 
saw nothing more than met their bodily eyes ; and, in 
despair of escaping the slavery which they saw the 
success of Ferdinand in Germany was likely to spread 
over Europe, they began the long train of voyages to 
the Western World, which times of suffering and uncer- 
tainty have continued at intervals to the present day. 



46 8 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

It is said that a vessel was stopped by royal warrant 
when it was on the point of sailing from the Thames 
with emigrants to Ameriea in 1637. On board were 
various persons whose names would probably never 
have been heard of if they had been allowed in peace 
and safety to pursue their way to Boston, but with 
which in a few years "all England rang from side to 
side." They were Oliver Cromwell, and Hampden, and 
Haselrig, Lord Brook, and Lord Saye. 

Affairs had now reached such a crisis that they could 
no longer continue undecided. A Parliament was 
called in 1640, after an unexampled interval of eleven 
years, and, after a few days' session, was angrily dis- 
solved. Another, however, was indispensable in the 
same year, and on the 3d of November the Long Parlia- 
ment met. The long-repressed indignation of the 
Commons broke forth at once. Laud and Wentworth, 
the principal advisers of the king, were tried and exe- 
cuted, and precautions taken, by stringent acts, to 
prevent a recurrence of arbitrary government. Every- 
where there seemed a rally in favour of the Protestant 
or liberal cause. The death of Eichelieu, the destroyer 
of French freedom, opened a prospect of recovered inde- 
pendence to the Huguenots; the victories of Torstenson 
the Swede, worthy successor of G-ustavus Adolphus, 
brought down the pride of the Austrian Catholics ; and 
Puritans, Independents, and other outraged sects and 
parties, by the restoration of the Parliament, got a ter- 
rible instrument of vengeance against their oppressors. 
A dreadful time, when on both sides the forms of law 
were perverted to the most lawless purposes; when 
peacefully-inclined citizens must have been tormented 
with sad misgivings by the contending claims of Parlia- 
ment and King, — a Parliament correctly constituted 
and in the exercise of its recognised authority, a King 



PROTESTANT VICTORIES. 469 

with no flaw to his title, and professing his willingness 

to limit himself to the undoubted prerogatives of his 

place. It was probably a relief to the undecided when 

,-.„ the arbitrament was removed from the court 

a.d. 1642. 

of argument to the field of battle. All the 
time of that miserable civil war, the other states of 
Europe were in nearly as great confusion as ourselves. 
France was torn to pieces by factions which contended 
for the mantle of the departed cardinal; Germany was 
traversed from end to end by alternately retreating and 
advancing armies. But still the simultaneousness of 
events abroad and at home is worthy of remark. The 
great fights which decided the quarrel in England were 
answered by victories of the Protestant arms in Ger- 
many and the apparent triumph of the discontented in 
France. The young king, Louis the Fourteenth, car- 
ried from town to town, and disputed between the 
parties, gave little augury of the despotism and injustice 
of his future throne. There were barricades in Paris, 
and insurrections all over the land. But at last, and 
at the same time, all the combatants in England, and 
France, and Germany — Huguenot, Puritan, Calvinist, 
Protestant, and Papist — were tired out with the length 
and bitterness of the struggle. So in 1648 the long 
Thirty Years' War was brought to a close by the Peace 
of Westphalia. Kingly power in France was curtailed, 
the house of Austria was humbled; and Charles was 
carried prisoner to Windsor. The Protestants of Ger- 
many, by the terms of the peace, were replaced in theii 
ancient possessions. They had freedom of worship and 
equality of civil rights secured. A general law pre- 
served them from the injustice or aggressions of theii 
local masters; and the compromise guaranteed by so 
many divergent interests, and guarded by such equally- 
divided numbers, has endured to the present time. The 

40 



470 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

English conquerors would be contented with no less 
than their foreign friends had obtained. But the blot 
upon their conduct, the blood of the misguided and 
humbled Charles, hindered the result of their wisest 
deliberations. Moderate men were revolted by the vio- 
lence of the act, and old English loyalty, delivered from 
the fear of foreign or domestic oppression, was awakened 
.,. « "by the sad end of a crowned and anointed 

A. p. 1649. J 

King. Nothing compensates in an old here- 
ditary monarchy for the want of high descent in its 
ruler. Not all Cromwell's vigour and genius, his glory 
abroad and energetic government at home, attracted 
the veneration of English squires, whose forefathers 
had fought at Crecy, to the grandson of a city knight, 
or, at most, to the descendant of a minister of Henry 
the Eighth. Charles the Second rose before them with 
the transmitted dignity of a hundred kings. He counted 
back to Scottish monarchs before the Norman Conquest, 
and traced by his mother's side his lineal ancestry up to 
Charlemagne and Clovis. English history presents no 
instance of the intrusion of an unroyal usurper in her 
list of sovereigns. Cromwell stands forth the solitary 
instance of a man of the people virtually seizing the 
crown; and the ballads and pamphlets of the time 
show how the comparative humility of his birth excited 
the scorn of his contemporaries. And this feeling was 
not limited to ancient lords and belted cavaliers : it 
permeated the common mind. There was something 
ennobling for the humblest peasant to die for King and 
Cause; but, however our traditions and the lapse of two 
hundred years may have elevated the conqueror at 
Worcester and Dunbar, we are not to forget that, in the 
estimation of those who had drunk his beer at Hunt- 
ingdon or listened to his tedious harangues in Parlia- 
ment, there would be neither patriotism nor honour in 



DECLINE OP PURITANISM. 4 ^ 

dying for bluff Old Noll. But there were more danger- 
ous enemies to bluff Old Noll than the newness of his 
name. The same cause which had made the nation dis- 
satisfied with the arbitrary pretensions of James and 
Charles was at work in making it intolerant of the rule 
of the usurpers. 

The great soldier and politician, who had overthrown 
an ancient dynasty and crushed the seditions of the 
sects, had increased the commercial prosperity of the 
three kingdoms. Wealth poured in at all the ports, and 
was rapidly diffused over the land; internal improve- 
ments kept pace with foreign enterprise; and the Eng- 
land which long ago had been too rich to be arbitrarily 
governed was now again too rich to be kept in durance 
by the sour-faced hyjDOcrisies of the Puritans. Those 
lank-haired gentlemen, whose conduct had not quite 
answered to the self-denying proclamations with which 
they had begun, were no longer able to persuade the 
well-to-do citizen, and the high-waged mechanic, and 
the prosperous farmer, that religion consisted in speak- 
ing through the nose and forswearing all innocent en- 
joyment. The great battle had been fought, and the 
fruits of it, they thought, were secure. Were people to 
be debarred from social meetings and merry-makings at 
Christmas, and junketings at fairs, by act of Parlia- 
ment ? Acts of Parliament would first have been re- 
quired strong enough to do away with youth and health, 
and the power of admiring beauty, and the hopes of 
a.d. 1641 marriage. The troubles had lasted, seven or 

-49. eight years; and all through that period, and 
for some time before, while the thick cloud was gather- 
ing, all gayety had disappeared from the land. But by 
the middle of Cromwell's time there was a new genera- 
tion, in the first flush of youth, — lads and lasses who 
had been too young to know any thing of the dark 



472 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

days of Laud and "Wcntworth. They were twenty 
years of age now. Were they to have no cakes and ale 
because their elders were so prodigiously virtuous ? 
They had many years of weary restraint and formalism 
to make up for, and in 1660 the accumulated tide of 
joyousness and delight burst all barriers. A flood of 
dancing and revelry, and utter abandonment to happi- 
ness, spread over the whole country; and merriest of 
the dancers, loudest of the revellers, happiest of the 
emancipated, was the young and brilliant king. Never 
since the old times of the Feasts of Fools and the 
gaudy processions of the Carnival had there been such 
a riotous jubilee as inaugurated the Eestoration. The 
reaction against Puritanism carried the nation almost 
beyond Christianity and landed it in heathenism again. 
The saturnalia of Eome were renewed in the banquet- 
ings of St. James's. Nothing in those first days of 
relaxation seemed real. King and courtiers and cava- 
liers in courtly palaces, and enthusiastic townsfolk and 
madly loyal husbandmen, seemed like mummers at a 
play ; and it was not till the candles were burned out, 
and the scenes grew dingy, and daylight poured upon 
that ghastly imitation of enjoyment, that England came 
to its sober senses again. Then it saw how false was 
the parody it had been playing. It had not been 
happy ; it had only been drunk ; and already, while 
Charles was in the gloss of his recovered crown, the 
second reaction began. Cromwell became respectable 
by comparison with the sensual debauchee who sold the 
dignity of his country for a little present enjoyment 
and soothed the reproaches of his people with a joke. 
Give us a Man to rule over us, the English said, and not 
a saycr of witty sayings and a juggler with such sleight 
of hand. And yet the example of the court was so con- 
tagious, and the fashion of enjoyment so wide-spread, 



ENGLAND DEGRADED. 473 

that on the surface every thing appeared prosperous 
and happy. The stern realities of the first recusants 
had been so travestied by the exaggerated imitation of 
their successors that no faith was placed in the serious 
earnestness of man or woman. Frivolity was therefore 
adopted as a mark of sense ; and if the popular litera- 
ture of a period is to be accepted as a mirror held up to 
show the time its image, the old English character had 
undergone a perfect change. Thousands flocked every 
day to the playhouses to listen to dialogues, and watch 
the evolvement of plots, where all the laws of decency 
and honour were held up to ridicule. Comus and his 
crew, which long ago had held their poetic festival in 
the pure pages of Milton, were let loose, without the 
purity or the poetry, in every family circle. And the 
worst and most disgusting feature of the picture is that 
those wassailers who were thus the missionaries of vice 
were persecutors for religion. While one royal brother 
was leading the revels at Whitehall, surrounded by 
luxury and immorality as by an atmosphere without 
which he could not live, the other, as luxurious, but 
more moodily depraved, listened to the groans of tor- 
tured Covenanters at Holyrood House. Charles and 
James were like the two executioners of Louis the 
Eleventh : one laughed, and the other groaned, but both 
were pitilessly cruel. A recurrence to the dark days of 
the Sects, the godly wrestlings in prayer of illiterate 
horsemen, and the sincere fanaticism of the Fifth-Mon- 
archy men, would have been a change for the better 
from the filth and foulness of the reign of the Merry 
Monarch and the blood and misery of that of the gloomy 
bigot. 

But happier times were almost within view, though 
©till hid behind the glare of those orgies of the unclean. 
From 1660 to 1688 does not seem a very long time in 

40* 



474 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

the annals of a nation, nor even in the life of one of 
ourselves. Twenty-eight years have elapsed since the 
Revolution in Paris whiCh placed Louis Philippe upon 
the throne ; and the young man of twenty at that time 
is not very old yet. But when men or nations are 
cheated in the object of their hopes, it does not take 
long to turn disappointment into hatred. The Restora- 
tion of 1660 was to bring back the golden age of the 
first years of James, — the prosperity without the 
tyranny, the old hereditary rule without its high pre- 
tensions, the manliness of the English yeoman without 
his tendency to fanatical innovation. And instead of 
this Arcadia there was nothing to be seen but a king- 
dom without dignity, a king without honesty, and a 
people without independence. England was no longer 
the arbiter of European differences, as in the earlier 
reigns, nor dominator of all the nations, as when the 
heavy sword of Cromwell was uneasy in its sheath. It 
was not even a second-rate power : its capital had been 
insulted by the Dutch; its monarch was pensioned by 
the French; its religion was threatened by the Pope; 
the old animosities between England and Scotland were 
unarranged ; and the point to be remembered in your 
review of the Seventeenth Century is that in the years 
from the Restoration to the Revolution we had touched 
the basest string of humility. We were neither united 
at home nor respected abroad. We had few ships, little 
commerce, and no public spirit. France revenged Creey 
and Poictiers and Agincourt, by dressing our kings in 
her livery ; and the degraded monarchs pocketed their 
wages without feeling their humiliation. Therefore, as 
the highest point we have hitherto stood upon was when 
Elizabeth saw the destruction of the Armada, the lowest 
was undoubtedly that when we submitted to the buf- 
foonery of Charles and the bloodthirstiness of James. 



LOUIS THE FOURTEENTH. 475 

But far more remarkable, as a characteristic of this 
century, than the lowering of the rank of England in 
relation to foreign states, is the rise, for the first time 
in Europe, of a figure hitherto unknown, — a true, un- 
shackled, and absolute king, and that in the least likely 
of all positions and in the person of the least likely 
man. This was the appearance on the throne of France 
of Louis the Fourteenth. Other monarchs, both in 
England and France, had attained supreme power, — 
supreme, but not independent. No one had hitherto 
been irresponsible to some other portions of the State. 
The strongest of the feudal kings was held in check by 
his nobility, — the greatest of the Tudors by Parliament 
and people. Declarations, indeed, had frequently been 
made that G-od's anointed were answerable to God 
alone. But of the two loudest of these declaimers, 
John, who said, — 

"What earthly power to interrogatory 
Can tax the free breath of a Christian king ?" 

had shortly after this magnificent oration surrendered 
his crown to the Pope ; and James the First, who blus- 
tered more fiercely (if possible) about his superiority to 
human law, was glad to bend before his Lords and 
Commons in anticipation of a subsidy, and eat his leek 
in peace. 

But this phenomenon of a . king above all other 
authority occurred, we have observed, in the most 
unlikely country to present so strange a sight ; for no- 
where was a European throne so weak and unstable as 
the throne of the house of Bourbon after the murder of 
Henry the Fourth. The moment that strong hand was 
withdrawn from the government, all classes broke loose. 
The nobles conspired against the queen, Marie de Medi- 
cis, who relied upon foreign favourites and irritated the 
nation to madness. Paris rose in insurrection, and tore 



476 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

the wretched Concini, her counsellor, whom she had 
created Marshal D'Ancre, to pieces ; and, to glut their 
vengeance still more, the judges condemned his inno- 
cent wife to be burned as a sorceress. Louis the Thir- 
teenth, the unworthy son of the great Henry, rejoiced 
in these atrocities, which he thought freed him from all 
restraint. But he found it impossible to quell the wild 
passions by which he profited for a while. Civil war 
raged between the court and country factions, and soon 
a.d. 1622. became embittered into religious animosities. 
The sight of a king marching at the head of a 
Catholic army against a portion of his Eeformed sub- 
jects was looked upon by the rapidly-increasing mal- 
contents in England with anxious curiosity. For year 
by year the strange spectacle was unrolled before their 
eyes of what might yet be their fate at home. Perhaps, 
indeed, the success of the royal arms, and the policy of 
strength and firmness introduced by Cardinal Eichelieu, 
may have contributed in no slight degree to the measures 
pursued by Wentworth and Laud in their treatment of 
the English recusants. With an anticipative interest in 
our Hull and Exeter, the Puritans of England looked on 
the resistance made by Eochelle ; and we can therefore 
easily imagine with what feelings the future soldiers of 
Marston Moor received the tidings that the Popish 
cardinal had humbled the capital of the Huguenots by 
the help of fleets furnished to them by Holland and 
England! Eichelieu, indeed, knew how to make his 
enemies weaken each other throughout his whole career. 
a.d. 1627. Tn08e enemies were the nobility of France, the 
house of Austria, and the Eeformed Faith. When 
Eochelle was attacked the second time, and England 
pretended to arm for its defence, he contrived to win 
Buckingham, the chief of the expedition, to his cause, 
and procured a letter from King Charles, placing the 



RICHELIEU. 477 

fleet, which apparently went to the support of the 
Huguenots, at the service of the King of France ! 
After a year's siege, and the most heroic resistance, 
Eochelle fell at last, in 1628. And, now that the Hugue- 
nots were destroyed as a dangerous party, the eyes of 
the great minister were turned against his other foes. 
He divided the nobles into hostile ranks, degraded them 
by petty annoyances, terrified them by unpitying execu- 
tions of the chiefs of the oldest families, showed their 
weakness by arresting marshals at the head of their 
armies, and during the remaining years of his authority 
monopolized all the powers of the state. To weaken 
Spain and Austria, we have seen how he assisted the 
Protestants in the Thirty Years' War ; to weaken Eng- 
land, which was only great when it assumed its place as 
bulwark and champion of the Protestant faith, he en- 
couraged the court in its suicidal policy and the 
oppressed population in resistance. Ever stirring up 
trouble abroad, and ever busy in repressing liberty at 
home, the ministry of Eichelieu is the triumph of un- 
principled skill. But when he died, in 1643, there was 
no man left to lift up the burden he threw off. The 
king himself, Louis the Thirteenth, as much a puppet 
as the old descendants of Clovis under their Mayors of 
the Palace, left the throne he had nominally filled, 
vacant in the same year; and the heir to the dis- 
honoured crown and exhausted country was a boy of 
five years of age, under the tutelage of an unprincipled 
mother, and with the old hereditary counsellors and 
props of his throne decimated by the scaffold or im- 
poverished by confiscation. The tyranny of Eichelieu 
had at least attained something noble by the high-handed 
insolence of all his acts. If people were to be trampled 
on, it was a kind of consolation to them that their op- 
pressor was feared by others as well as themselves. 



478 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

But the oppression of the doomed French nation was to 
be continued by a more ignoble hand. The Cardinal 
Mazarin brought every thing into greater confusion 
than ever. In twenty millions of men there will always 
be great and overmastering spirits, if only an opportu- 
nity is found for their development ; but civil commo- 
tion is not the element in which greatness lives. All 
sense of honour disappears when conduct is regulated 
a.d. 1648 D y the shifting motives of party politics. The 
-1654. dissensions of the Fronde, accordingly, produced 
no champion to whom either side could look with un- 
mingled respect. The Great Conde and the famous 
Turenne showed military talent of the highest order, 
but a want of principle and a flighty frivolity of cha- 
racter counterbalanced all their virtues. The scenes of 
those six years are like a series of dissolving views, or 
the changing combinations of a kaleidoscope : Conde and 
Turenne, always on opposite sides, — for each changed 
his party as often as the other ; battles prepared for by 
masquerades and theatricals, and celebrated on both 
sides with epigrams and songs ; the wildest excesses of 
debauchery and vice practised by both sexes and all 
ranks in the State ; archbishops fighting like gladiators 
aud intriguing like the vulgarest conspirators; princes 
imprisoned with a jest, and executions attended with 
cheers and laughter; and over all an Italian ecclesiastic, 
grinning with satisfaction at the increase of his wealth, 
— caballing, cheating, and lying, but keeping a firm 
grasp of power : — no country was ever so split into 
faction or so denuded of great men. 

It seemed, indeed, like a demoniacal caricature of our 
British troubles: no sternness, no reality; love-letters 
and witty verses supplying the place of the Biblical lan- 
guage and awful earnestness of the words and deeds of 
the Covenanters and Independents; the gentlemen of 



DESPOTISM OF LOUIS XIV. 4 ?9 

France utterly debased and frivolized j religion ridi- 
culed; nothing left of the old landmarks; and no Crom- 
well possible. But, while all these elements of confu- 
sion were heaving and tumbling in what seemed an 
inextricable chaos, Mazarin, the vainest and most selfish 
of charlatans, died, and the young king, whom he had 
kept in distressing dependence and the profoundest 
political inactivity, found himself delivered from a 
master and free to choose his path. This was in 1661. 
Charles and Louis were equally on their recovered 
thrones ; for what exile had been to the one, Mazarin 
a.d. 1641 na d been to the other. Charles had had the 
-1660. experience of nineteen years and of various 
fortunes to guide him. He had seen many men and 
cities, and he deceived every expectation. Louis had 
been studiously brought up by his mother and her 
Italian favourite in the abasement of every lofty aspira- 
tion. He was only encouraged in luxury and vice, and 
kept in such painful vassalage that his shyness and 
awkwardness revealed the absence of self-respect to the 
very pages of his court ; and he, no less than Charles, 
deceived all the expectations that had been formed 
of his career. He found out, as if by intuition, how 
brightly the monarchical principle still burned in the 
heart of all the French. Even in their fights and quar- 
rellings there was a deep reverence entertained for the 
ideal of the throne. The King's name was a tower of 
strength; and when the nation, in the course of the 
miserable years from 1610 to 1661, saw the extinction 
of nobility, religion, law, and almost of civilized society, 
it caught the first sound that told it it still had a king, 
as an echo from the past assuring it of its future. It 
forgot Louis the Thirteenth and Anne of Austria, and 
only remembered that its monarch was the grandson of 
Henry the Fourth. Nobody remembered that circum- 



480 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

stance so vividly as Louis himself; but he remembered 
also that his line went upwards from the Bourbons, and 
included the Saint Louis of the thirteenth century and 
the renewer of the Eoman Empire of the ninth. He 
let the world know, therefore, that his title was Most 
Christian King as well as foremost of European powers. 
He forced Spain to yield him precedence, and, for the 
first time in history, exacted a humiliating apology from 
the Pope. The world is always apt to take a man at 
his own valuation. Louis, swelling with pride, ambitious 
of fame, and madly fond of power, declared himself the 
greatest, wisest, and most magnificent of men; and 
everybody believed him. Every thing was soon changed 
throughout the land. Ministers had been more powerful 
than the crown, and had held unlimited authority in 
right of their appointment. A minister was nothing 
more to Louis than a valet-de-chambre. He gave him 
certain work to do, and rewarded him if he did it; if 
he neglected it, he discharged him. At first the few 
relics of the historic names of France, the descendants 
of the great vassals, who carried their heads as lofty as 
the Capets or Yalois, looked on with surprise at the 
new arrangements in camp and court. But the people 
were too happy to escape the oligarchic confederacy of 
those hereditary oppressors to encourage them in their 
haughty disaffection. Before Louis had been three 
years on the unovershadowed throne, the struggle had 
been fairly entered on by all the orders of the State, 
which should be most slavish in its submission. Rank, 
talent, beauty, science, and military fame all vied with 
each other in their devotion to the king. He would 
have been more than mortal if he had retained his 
senses unimpaired amid the intoxicating fumes of such 
incense. Success in more important affairs came to the 
support of his personal assumptions. Victories followed 



CARES OF ROYALTY. 481 

his standards everywhere. Generals, engineers, and ad- 
ministrators, of abilities hitherto unmatched in Europe, 
sprang up whenever his requirements called them forth. 
Colbert doubled his income without increasing the 
burdens on his people. Turenne, Conde, Luxembourg, 
and twenty others, led his armies. Yauban strengthened 
his fortifications or conducted his sieges, and the dock- 
yards of Toulon and Brest filled the Mediterranean and 
the Atlantic with his fleets. Poets like Moliere, Cor- 
neille, and Eacine ennobled his stage ; while the genius 
of Bossuet and Fenelon inaugurated the restoration of 
religion. For eight-and-twenty years his fortunes knew 
no ebb. He was the object of all men's hopes and fears, 
and almost of their prayers. Nothing was too great or 
too minute for his decision. He was called on to arbi- 
trate (with the authority of a master) between sove- 
reign States, and to regulate a point of precedence be- 
tween the duchesses of his court. Oh, the weary days 
and nights of that uneasy splendour at Versailles ! when 
his steps were watched by hungry courtiers, and his 
bed itself surrounded by applicants for place and favour. 
~No galley-slave ever toiled harder at his oar than this 
monarch of all he surveyed at the management of his 
unruly family. It was the day of etiquette and form. 
The rights of princesses to arm-chairs or chairs with 
only a back were contested with a vigour which might 
have settled the succession to a throne. The rank 
which entitled to a seat in the king's coach or an invi- 
tation to Marly was disputed almost with bloodshed, 
and certainly with scandal and bitterness. The depth 
of the bows exacted by a prince of the blood, the 
number of attendants necessary for a legitimated son 
of La Valliere or Montespan, put the whole court into 
a turmoil of angry parties; and all these important 
points, and fifty more of equal magnitude, were formally 

2 F 41 



482 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

submitted to the king and decided with a gravity befit- 
ting a weightier cause. Nothing is more remarkable in 
the midst of these absurd inanities than the great fund 
of good common sense that is found in all the king's 
judgments. He meditates, and temporizes, and reasons ; 
and only on great occasions, such as a quarrel about dig- 
nity between the wife of the dauphin and the Duchess 
of Maine, does he put on the terrors of his kingly frown 
and interpose his irresistible command. It would have 
been some consolation to the foreign potentates he 
bullied or protected — the Austrian and Spaniard, or 
Charles in Whitehall — if they had known what a 
wretched and undignified life their enslaver and insulter 
lived at home. It was whispered, indeed, that he was 
tremendously hen-pecked by Madame de Maintenon, 
whom he married without having the courage to elevate 
her to the throne ; but none of them knew the petti- 
nesses, the degradations, and the miseries of his inner 
circle. They thought, perhaps, he was planning some 
innovation in the order of affairs in Europe, — the de- 
struction of a kingdom, or the change of a dynasty. 
He was devoting his deepest cogitations to the arrange- 
ment of a quarrel between his sons and his daughters-in- 
law, the invitations to a little supper-party in his private 
room, or the number of steps it was necessary to ad- 
vance at the reception of a petty Italian sovereign. The 
quarrels between his children became more bitter ; the 
little supper-parties became more dull. Death came into 
the gilded chambers, and he was growing old and deso- 
late. Still the torturing wheel of ceremony went round, 
and the father, with breaking heart, had to leave the 
chamber of his deceased son, and act the part of a 
great king, and go through the same tedious forms of 
jrrandeur and routine which he had done before the 
calamity came. Fancy has never drawn a personage 



EDICT OF NANTES REPEALED. 483 

more truly pitiable than Louis growing feeble and friend- 
less in the midst of all that magnificence and all that 
heartless crowd. You pardon him for retiring for con- 
solation and sympathy to the quiet apartment where 
Madame de Maintenon received him without formality 
and continued her needlework or her reading while he 
was engaged in council with his ministers. He must 
have known that to all but her he was an Office and not 
a Man. He yearned for somebody that he could trust 
in and consult with, as entering into his thoughts and in- 
terests; and that calm-blooded, meek-mannered, narrow- 
hearted woman persuaded him that in her he had found 
all that his heart thirsted for in the desert of his royalty. 
But in that little apartment he was now to find refuge 
from more serious calamities than the falsehood of 
courtiers or the quarrels of women. Even French 
loyalty was worn out at last. Victories had glorified 
the monarch, but brought poverty and loss to the popu- 
lation. Complaints arose in all parts of the country of 
the excess of taxation, the grasping dishonesty of the 
collectors, the extravagance of the court, and even — but 
this was not openly whispered — the selfishness of the 
king. He had lavished ten millions sterling on the 
palace and gardens of Versailles; he had enriched his 
sycophants with pensions on the Treasury; he had 
gratified the Church with gorgeous donations, and with 
the far more fatal gift of vengeance upon its opponents. 
The Huguenots were in the peaceful enjoyment of the 
rights secured to them by the Edict of ]STantes, granted 
by Henry the Fourth in 1598. But those rights in- 
cluded the right of worshipping God in a different 
manner from the Church, and denying the distinguish- 
ing doctrines of the Holy Catholic faith. The Edict of 

'- Toleration was repealed as a blot on the purity 
A.d. 1685. x r j 

of the throne of the Most Christian King. 



484 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

Thousands of the best workmen in France were ban- 
ished by this impolitic proceeding, and Louis thought he 
had shown his attachment to his religion by sending the 
ingenuity and wealth, and glowing animosity, of the most 
valuable portion of his subjects into other lands. Ger- 
many calculated that the depopulation caused by his 
wars was more than compensated by the immigration. 
England could forgive him his contemptuous behaviour to 
her king and Parliament when she saw the silk-mills of 
Spitalfields supplied by the skilled workmen of Lyons. 
Eight hundred thousand people left their homes in con- 
sequence of this proscription of their religion, and Ger- 
many and Switzerland grew rich with the stream of 
fugitives. It is said that only five thousand found their 
way to this country, — enough to set the example of 
peaceful industry and to introduce new methods of 
manufacture. 

But the full benefit of the measures of Louis and 
Maintenon was denied us, by the distrust with which 
the Protestant exiles looked on the accession to our 
throne of a narrower despot and more bigoted persecu- 
tor than Louis; for in this same year James the Second 
succeeded Charles. Relying on each other's support, 
and gratified with the formal approval of the repeal of 
the Edict of Nantes pronounced by the Pope, the two 
champions of Christendom pursued their way, — dis- 
missals from office, exclusion from promotion, proscrip- 
tion from worship in France, and assaults on the Church, 
and bloody assizes, in England, — till all the nations felt 
that a great crisis was reached in the fortunes both of 
England and France, and Protestant and Eomanist 
alike looked on in expectation of the winding-up of so 
strange a history. Judicial blindness was equally on 
the eyes of the two potentates chiefly interested. James 
remained inactive while William Prince of Orange, the 



ABDICATION OF JAMES II. 485 

avowed chief of the new opinions, was getting ready 
his ships and army, and congratulated himself on the 
silence of his people, which he thought was the sign of 
their acquiescence instead of the hush of expectation. 
All the other powers — the Papal Chair included — were 
not sorry to see a counterpoise to the predominance of 
France ) and when William appeared in England as the 
deliverer from Popery and oppression, the battle 
was decided without a blow. James was a 
fugitive in his turn, and found his way to Versailles. 
It is difficult to believe that any of the blood of Scot- 
land or Navarre flowed in the veins of the pusillanimous 
king. He begged his protector, through whose councils 
he had lost his kingdom, to give it him back again; and 
the opportunity of a theatrical display of grandeur and 
magnanimity was too tempting to be thrown away. 
Louis promised to restore him his crown, as if it were 
a broken toy. It was a strange sight, during the re- 
mainder of their lives, to see those two monarchs keep- 
ing up the dignity of their rank by exaggerations of 
their former state. No mimic stage ever presented a 
more piteous spectacle of poverty and tinsel than the 
royal pair. Punctilios were observed at their meetings 
and separations, as if a bow more or less were of as 
much consequence as the bestowal or recovery of Great 
Britain; and in the estimation of those professors of 
manners and deportment a breach of etiquette would 
have been more serious than La Hogue or the Boyne. 
In that wondrous palace of Versailles all things had 
long ceased to be real. Speeches were made for effect, 
and dresses and decorations had become a part of the 
art of governing, and for some years the system, seemed 
to succeed. When the king required to show that he 
was still a conqueror like Alexander the Great, prepara- 
tions were made for his reception at the seat of war, 

41* 



48G SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 

and a pre-arranged victory was attached to his arrival, 
as Cleopatra wished to fix a broiled fish to Anthony's 
hook. . He entered the town of Mons in triumph when 
Luxembourg had secured its fall. He appeared also 
with unbounded applause at the first siege of JSTamur, 
and carried in person the news of his achievement to 
Versailles. Every day came couriers hot and tired with 
intelligence of fresh successes. Luxembourg conquered 
at Fleurus, 1690; Catinat conquered Savoy, 1691; Lux- 
embourg again, in 1692, had gained the great day of 
Steinkirk, and ISTerwinde in 1693. But the tide now 
turned. William the Third was the representative at 
that time of the stubbornness of his new subjects' 
character, who have always found it difficult to see that 
they were defeated. He was generally forced to retire 
after a vigorously-contested fight; but he was always 
ready to fight again next day, always calm and deter- 
mined, and as confident as ever in the firmness of his 
men. Reports very different from the glorious bulletins 
of the earlier years of the Great Monarch now came 
pouring in. Namur was retaken, Dieppe and Havre 
bombarded, all the French establishments in India 
seized by the Dutch, their colony at St. Domingo cap- 
tured by the English, Luxembourg dead, and the whole 
land again, for the second time, exhausted of men and 
money. It was another opportunity for the display of 
his absolute power. France prayed him to grant peace 
to Europe, and the earthly divinity granted France's 
prayer. Europe itself, which had rebelled against him, 
accepted the pacification it had won by its battles and 
combinations, as if it were a gift from a superior being. 
He surrendered his conquests with such grandeur, and 
looked so dignified while he withdrew his pretensions, 
acknowledging the Prince of Orange to be King of 
England, and the King of England to have no claim on 



DEPRESSION OF FRANCE. 48 ? 

the crown he had promised to restore to him, that it 

,*«„ took some time to perceive that the terms of the 
a.d. 1697. . L 

Peace of Byswiek were proofs of weakness and 
not of magnanimity. But the object of his life had 
been gained. He had abased every order in the State 
for the aggrandizement of the Crown, and, for the first 
time since the termination of the Roman Empire, had 
concentrated the whole power of a nation into the will 
of an individual. And this strange spectacle of a pos- 
sessor of unlimited authority over the lives and fortunes 
of all his subjects was presented in an age that had 
seen Charles the First of England brought to the block 
and James the Second driven into exile ! The chance 
of France's peacefully rising again from this state of de- 
pression into liberty would have been greater if Louis, 
in displacing the other authorities, had not disgraced 
them. He dissolved his Parliament, not with a file of 
soldiers, like Cromwell or Napoleon, but with a riding- 
whip in his hand. He degraded the nobility by making 
them the satellites of his throne and creatures of his 
favour. He humbled the Church by secularizing its 
leaders ; so that Bossuet, bishop and orator as he was, 
was proud to undertake the office of peacemaker between 
him and Madame de Montespan in one of their lovers' 
quarrels. And the Frenchmen of the next century 
looked in vain for some rallying-point from w T hich to 
begin their forward course towards constitutional im- 
provement. They found nothing but parliaments con- 
temned, nobles dishonoured, and priests unchristianized. 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 



Ittnjjs of Stance. 


Ittngs of 3Enalantr ant» S^otle 


A.D. 

Louis XIV. — (cont.) 


A.D. 


William III. and Mary.-t 


1715. Louis XV. 




(cont.) 


1774. Louis XVI. 


1702. 


Anne. 


1793. Louis XVII. 




(Great Britain, 1707.) 


lEmperors of (^errnanp 

Leopold I. — {cont.) 
1705. Joseph I. 
1711. Charles VI. 


1714. 

' 1727. 

1760. 


George I. "\ tt p 
) House oi 

George II. > tt 

i Hanover. 

George III. J 

Ittngs of Spain* 


1740. Maria-Theresa. 


1700. 


Philip V. 


1742. Charles VII. 


1724. 


Louis I. 


1745. Francis I. 


1724. 


Philip V. again. 


1765. Joseph II. 


1745. 


Ferdinand VI. 


1790. Leopold II. 


1759. 


Charles III. 


1792. Francis II. 


1788. 


Charles IV. 



Btstmgutsfjefi Men* 

Addison, Steele, Swift, Pope, Eobertson, Hume, Gibbon, 
Voltaire, Eousseau, Lesage, Marmontel, Montesquieu, Frank- 
lin, (1706-1790,) Johnson, (1709-1784,) Goldsmith, (1728-1774,) 
Wolfe, (1726-1759,) Washington, (1732-1799.) 



THE EIGHTEENTH CENTUBY. 

INDIA AMERICA FRANCE. 

The characteristic feature of this period is constant 
change on the greatest scale. Hitherto changes have 
occurred in the internal government of nations : the 
monarchic or popular feeling has found its expression in 
the alternate elevation of the Kingly or Parliamentary 
power. But in this most momentous of the centuries, 
nations themselves come into being or disappear. 
Bussia and Prussia for the first time play conspicuous 
parts in the great drama of human affairs. France, 
which begins the century with the despotic Louis the 
Fourteenth at its head, leaves it as a vigorous Bepublic, 
with Napoleon Buonaparte as its First Consul. The 
foundations of a British empire were laid in India, 
which before the end of the period more than com- 
pensated for the loss of that other empire in the "West, 
which is now the United States of America. It was the 
century of the breaking of old traditions, and of the 
introduction of new systems in life and government, — 
more complete in its transformations than the splitting 
up into hitherto unheard-of nationalities of the old 
Boman world had been; for what Goth and Yandal, 
and Frank and Lombard, were to the political geo- 
graphy of Europe in the earlier time, new modes of 
thought, both religious and political, were to the moral 
constitution of that later date. The barbarous inva- 
sions of the early centuries were the overflowing of 
rivers by the breaking down of the embankments ; the 

491 



492 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

revolutionary madness of France was the sudden de- 
tachment of an avalanche which had been growing 
unobserved, but which at last a voice or a footstep was 
sufficieDt to set in motion. In all nations it was a period 
of doubt and uneasiness. Something was about to happen, 
but nobody could say what. The political sleight-of-hand 
men, who considered the safety of the world to depend 
on the balance of power, where a weight must be cast 
into one scale, exactly sufficient, and not more than suffi- 
cient, to keep the other in equilibrio, were never so much 
puzzled since the science of balancing began. A vast 
country, hitherto omitted from their calculations, or 
only considered as a make-weight against Sweden or 
Denmark, suddenly came forward to be a check, and 
sometimes an over-weight, to half the states in Europe. 
Something had therefore to be found to*be a counter- 
poise to the twenty millions of men and illimitable 
dominions of the Eussian Czars. This was close at the 
conjurer's hand in Prussia and her Austrian neighbour. 
Counties were added, — populations fitted in, — Silesia 
given to the one, Gallicia added to the other; and at 
last the whole of Poland, which had ceased to be of any 
importance in its separate existence, was cut up into 
such portions as might be required, with here a frag- 
ment and there a fragment, till the scales stood pretty 
even, and the three contiguous kingdoms were satisfied 
with their respective shares of infamy and plunder. If 
you hear, therefore, of robberies upon a gigantic scale, — 
no longer the buccaneering exploits of a few isolated 
adventurers in the Western seas, but of kingdoms deli- 
berately stolen, or imperiously taken hold of by the right 
of the strong hand; of the same Titanic magnitude 
distinguishing almost all other transactions; colonies 
throwing off their allegiance, and swelling out into 
hostile empires, instead of the usual discontent and 



NATIONAL DEBT. 493 

occasional quarrellings between the mother-country and 
her children ; of whole nations breaking forth into 
anarchy, instead of the former local efforts at reforma- 
tion ending in temporary civil strife; of commercial 
speculations reaching the sublime of swindling and 
credulity, and involving whole populations in ruin ; and 
of commercial establishments, on the other hand, vaster 
even in their territorial acquisitions than all the con- 
quests of Alexander, — you are to remember that these 
things can only have happened in the Eighteenth Cen- 
tury; the century when the trammels of all former 
experiences were thrown off, and when wealth, power, 
energy, and mental aspirations were pushed to an unex- 
ampled excess. This exaggerated action of the age is 
shown in the one great statement which nearly com- 
prehends all the rest. The Debt of this country, which 
at the beginning of this century was sixteen millions 
and a half and tormented our forefathers with fears of 
bankruptcy, had risen at the end of it, in the heroic 
madness of conquest and national pride, to the sum of 
three hundred and eighty millions, without a doubt of 
our perfect competency to sustain the burden. 

If the tendency of affairs on the other side of our 
encircling sea was to pull down, to destroy, to modify, 
and to redistribute, the tendency at home was to build 
up and consolidate ; so that in almost exact proportion 
to the wild experiments and frantic strugglings of other 
nations after something new — new principles of govern- 
ment, new theories of society — there arose in this 
country a dogged spirit of resistance to all alterations, 
and a persistence in old paths and old opinions. The 
charms which constitution-mongers saw in untried 
novelties and philosophic systems existed for John Bull 
only in what had stood the wear and tear of hundreds 
of years. The Prussians, Austrians, Americans, and 

42 



494 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 



finally the French, were groping after vague abstrac- 
tions; and Frederick the Soldier, and Joseph the Philan- 
thropist, and Citizen Franklin, and Lafayette and Mira- 
beau, were each in their own way carried away with 
the delusion of a golden age; but the English statesmen 
clung rigidly to the realities of life, — declared the 
universal fraternity of nations to be a cry of knaves or 
hypocrites, — and answered all exclamations about the 
dignity of humanity and the sovereignty of the people 
with "Kule Britannia," and "God save the King." 
How deeply this sentiment of loyalty and traditionary 
Toryism is seated in the national mind is proved by 
nothing so much as by the dreadful ordeal it had to go 
through in the days of the first two Georges. It cer- 
tainly was a faith altogether independent of external 
circumstances, which saw the divinity that hedges 
kings in such vulgar, gossiping, and undignified indi- 
viduals. And yet through all the troubled years of their 
reigns the great British heart beat true with loyalty to 
the throne, though it was grieved with the proceedings 
of the sovereigns; and when the third, George gave it a 
man to rally round — as truly native-born as the most 
indigenous of the people, as stubborn, as strong-willed, 
and as determined to resist innovation as the most con- 
sistent of the squires and most anti-foreign of the citi- 
zens — the nation attained a point of union which had 
never been known in all their previous history, and 
looked across the Channel, at the insanity of the per- 
plexed populations and the threats of their furious 
leaders, with a growl of contempt and hatred which 
warned their democrats and incendiaries of the fate 
that awaited them here. There are times in all national 
annals when the narrowest prejudices have an amazing 
resemblance to the noblest virtues. When Hannibal 
was encamped at the gates of Borne, the bigoted old 



MILITARY GLORY. 4 ^ 

Patricians in the forum carried on their courts of law 
as usual, and would not deduct a farthing from the value 
of the lands they set up for sale, though the besieger 
was encamped upon them. When a king of Sicily 
offered a great army and fleet for the defence of Greece 
against the Persians, the Athenian ambassador said, 
" Heaven forefend that a man of Athens should serve 
under a foreign admiral!" The Lacedemonian ambas- 
sador said the Spartans would put him to death if he 
proposed any man but a Spartan to command their 
troops ; and those very prejudiced and narrow-minded 
patriots were reduced to the necessity of exterminating 
the invaders by themselves. Great Britain, in the year 
1800, was also of opinion that she was equal to all the 
world, — that she could hold her own whatever powers 
might be gathered against her, — and would not have 
exchanged her Hood, and Jervis, and Nelson, for the 
assistance of all the fleets of Europe. 

Nothing seems to die out so rapidly as the memory 
of martial achievements. The military glory of this 
country is a thing of fits and starts. Cressy and Poic- 
tiers left us at a pitch of reputation which you might 
have supposed would have lasted for a long time. But 
in a very few years after those victories the English 
name was a byword of reproach. All the conquests 
of the Edwards were wrenched away, and it needed 
only the short period of the reign of Eichard the 
Second to sink the recollection of the imperturbable 
line and inevitable shaft. Henry the Fifth and Agin- 
court for a moment brought the previous triumphs into 
very vivid remembrance. But civil dissensions between 
York and Lancaster blunted the English sword upon 
kindred helmets, and peaceful Henry the Seventh loaded 
the subject with intolerable taxes, and his son wasted 
his treasures in feasts and tournaments. The long reigns 



496 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

of Elizabeth and James were undistinguished by British 
armies performing any separate achievements on the 
Continent; and again civil war lavished on domestic 
fields an amount of courage and conduct which would 
have eclipsed all previous actions if exhibited on a 
wider scene. We need not, therefore, be surprised, if, 
after the astonishing course of Louis the Fourteenth's 
arms, the discomfiture of his adversaries, the constant 
repulses of the English contingent which fought under 
William in Flanders, and at last the quiet, looking so 
like exhaustion, which ushered in the Eighteenth Cen- 
tury, the British forces were despised, and we were con- 
fessed, in the ludicrous cant which at intervals becomes 
fashionable still, to be not a military nation. How this 
astounding proposition agrees with the fact that we 
have met in battle every single nation, and tribe, and 
kindred, and tongue, on the face of the whole earth, in 
Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, and have beaten 
them all ; how it farther agrees with the fact that no 
civilized power was ever engaged in such constant and 
multitudinous wars, so that there is no month or week 
in the history of the last two hundred years in which it 
can be said we were not interchanging shot or sabre- 
stroke somewhere or other on the surface of the globe ; 
how, further still, the statement is to be reconciled with 
the fact, perceptible to all mankind, that the result of 
these engagements is an unexampled growth of influ- 
ence and empire, — the acquisition of kingdoms defended 
by millions of warriors in Hindostan, of colonies ten 
times the extent of the conqueror's realm, defended by 
Montcalm and the armies of France, — we must leave to 
the individuals who make it : the truth being that the 
British people is not only the most military nation the 
world has ever seen, not excepting the Eoman, but the 
most warlike. It is impossible to say when these pages 



SPANISH SUCCESSION. 497 

may meet the reader's eye; but, at whatever time it may 
be, he has only to look at the "Times" newspaper of that 
morning, and he will see that either in the East or the 
West, in China or the Cape, or the Persian Gulf, or on 
the Indus, or the Irrawaddy, the meteor flag is waved 
in bloody advance. And this seems an indispensable 
part of the British position. She is so ludicrously 
small upon the map, and so absorbed in speculation, so 
padded with cotton, and so sunk in coal-pits, that it is 
only constant experience of her prowess that keeps the 
world aware of her power. The other great nations 
can repose upon their size, and their armies of six or 
seven hundred thousand men. Nobody would think 
France or Eussia weak because they were inactive. 
But with us the case is different : we must fight or fall. 

Twice in the century we are now engaged on, we 
rose to be first of the military states in Europe, and 
twice, by mere inaction, we sank to the rank of Portugal 
or Naples. 

Charles the Second of Spain died in November, 1700, — 
a person so feeble in health and intellect that in a lower 
state of life he would have been put in charge of guar- 
dians and debarred from the management of his affairs. 
As he was a king, these duties were performed on his 
behalf by the priests, and the wretched young man — he 
succeeded at three years old — was nothing but the slave 
and plaything of his confessor. Yet, though his exist- 
ence was of no importance, his decease set all Europe 
in turmoil. By his testament, obtained from him on his 
death-bed, he appointed the grandson of Louis the 
Fourteenth his heir. A previous will had nominated 
Charles of Austria. A previous treaty between Louis 
and "William of England and the States of Holland had 
arranged a partition of the Spanish monarchy for the 
benefit of the contracting parties and the maintenance 

2G 42* 



4 ^8 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

of the balance of power. But now, when a choice was 
to be made between the wills and the treaty, between 
the balance of power and his personal ambition, the 
temptation was too great for the cupidity of the Grand 
Monarque. He accepted the throne of Spain and the 
Indies for his grandson Philip of Anjou, and sent him 
over the Pyrenees to take possession of his dignity. The 
stroke was so sudden that people were silent from sur- 
prise. A French prince at Madrid, at Milan, and Naples, 
was only the lieutenant in those capitals for the French 
king. The preponderance of the house of Bourbon was 
dangerous to the liberties of Europe, and when the 
house of Bourbon was represented by the haughtiest, 
and vainest, and most insulting of men, the dignity of 
the remaining sovereigns was offended by his ostenta- 
tious superiority; and the house of Austria, which in 
the previous century had been the terror of statesmen 
and princes, was turned to as a shelter from its success- 
ful rival, and all the world prepared to defend the cause 
of the Austrian Charles. The affairs of Europe, which 
were disturbed by the death of an imbecile king in 
Spain, were further complicated by the death of a still 
more imbecile king at St. Germain's. James the Second 
brought his strange life to a close in 1701 ; and, though 
the advisers of Louis pointed out the consequence of 
offending England at that particular time by recognising 
the Prince of Wales as inheritor of the English crown, 
the vanity of the old man who could not forego the 
luxury of having a crowned king among his attendants 
prevailed over his better knowledge, and one day, to the 
amazement of courtiers and council, he gave the royal 
reception to James the Third, and threw down the 
gauntlet to William and England, which they were not 
slow to take up. William of Orange was not popular 
among his new subjects, and was always looked on as a 



MARLBOROUGH. 4 " 

foreigner. Perhaps the memory of Kuyter and Van 
Tromp was still fresh enough to make him additionally 
disliked because he was a Dutchman. But when it was 
known over the country that the bigoted and insulting 
despot in Paris had nominated a King of England, while 
the man the nation had chosen was still alive in White- 
hall, the indignation of all classes was roused, and found 
its expression in loyalty and attachment to their de- 
liverer from Popery and persecution. Great exertions 
were made to conduct the war on a scale befitting the 
importance of the interests at stake. Addresses poured 
in, with declarations of devotion to the throne ; troops 
were raised, and taxes voted ; and in the midst of these 
preparations, the King, prematurely old, in the fifty- 
third year of his age, died of a fall from his horse at 
Kensington, in March, 1702, and the powers of Europe 
felt that the best soldier they possessed was lost to the 
cause. Rather it was a fortunate thing for the confede- 
rated princes that William died at this time ; for he never 
rose to the rank of a first-rate commander, and was so 
ambitious of glory and power that he would not have 
left the way clear for a greater than himself. 

This was found in Marlborough. Military science was 
the characteristic of this illustrious general ; and no one 
before his time had ever possessed in an equal degree 
the power of attaching an army to its chief, or of regu- 
lating his strategic movements by the higher considera- 
tion of policy and statesmanship. For the first time, in 
English history at least, a march was equivalent to a 
battle. A change of his camp, or even a temporary re- 
treat, was as effectual as a victory; and it was seen by 
the clearer observers of the time that a campaign was 
a game of skill, and not of the mere dash and intrepidity 
which appeal to the vulgar passions of our nature. Not 
so, however, the general public : their idea of war was 



500 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

a succession of hard knocks, with enormous lists of the 
killed and wounded. A manoeuvre, without a charge 
of bayonets at the end of it, was little better than cow- 
ardice; and complaints were loud and common against 
the inactivity of a man who, by dint of long-prepared 
combinations, compelled the enemy to retreat by a mere 
shift of position and cleared the Low Countries of its 
invaders without requiring to strike a blow. a Let them 
see how we can fight," cried all the corporations in the 
realm : " anybody can march and pitch his camp." And 
it is not impossible that the foreign populations who had 
never seen the red-coats, or, at most, who had only 
known them acting as auxiliaries to the Dutch and 
often compelled to retire before the numbers and im- 
petuosity of the French, had no expectation of success 
when they should be fairly brought opposite, their former 
antagonists. Friends and foes alike were prepared for 
a renewal of the days of Luxembourg and Turenne. 
In this they were not disappointed; for a pupil of 
Turenne renewed, in a very remarkable manner, the 
glories of his master. Marlborough had served under 
that great commander, and profited by his lessons. He 
had fifty thousand British soldiers under his undivided 
command; and, to please the grumblers at home and 
the doubters abroad, he made the reign of Anne the 
most glorious in the English military annals by thick- 
coming fights, still unforgotten, though dimmed by the 
exploits of the more illustrious Wellington. The first 
of these was Blenheim, against the French and Bava- 
rians, in 1704. How different this was from the hand- 
to-hand thrust and parry of ancient times is shown by. 
the fate of a strong body of French, who were so posted 
on this occasion that the duke saw they were in his 
power without requiring to fire a gun. He sent his aid- 
de-camp, Lord Orkney, to them to point out the hope- 



PEACE OF UTRECHT. 50J 

lessness of tlieir position; and when he rode up, ac- 
companied by a French officer, to act, perhaps, as his 
interpreter, a shout of gratulation broke from the unsus- 
pecting Frenchmen. "Is it a prisoner you have brought 
us?" they asked their countryman. "Alas! no," he 
replies: "Lord Orkney has come from Marlborough to 
tell you you are his prisoners. His lordship offers you 
your lives." A glance at the contending armies con- 
firmed the truth of this appalling communication, and 
the brigade laid down its arms. The tide of victory, 
once begun, knew no ebb till the grandeur of Louis 
the Fourteenth was overwhelmed. Disgraces followed 
quickly one upon the other, — marshals beaten, towns 
taken, conquests lost, his wealth exhausted, his people 
discontented, and the bravest of his generals hopeless 
of success. Prince Eugene of Savoy, equal to Marl- 
borough in military genius, was more embittered against 
the French monarch, to whom he had offered his ser- 
vices, and who had had the folly to reject them. France, 
on the side of Germany and the Low Countries, was 
pressed upon by the triumphant invaders. In Spain, 
the affairs of the new king were more desperate still. 
Gibraltar was taken in 1704. Lord Peterborough, a wiser 
Quixote, of whose victories it is difficult to say whether 
they were the result of madness or skill, marched 
through the kingdom at the head of six or seven thou- 
sand English and conquered wherever he went. 

When the war had lasted eight or nine years, the 
reputation of Marlborough and the British arms was at 
its height. Our fleets were masters of the sea, and the 
G-rand Monarque sent humble petitions to the opposing 
powers for peace upon any terms. People tell us that 
Marlborough rejected all overtures which might have 
deprived him of the immense emoluments he received 
for carrying on the war. Perhaps, also, he was inspired 



502 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 



by the love of fame; but, whether meanness or ambition 
was his motive, his warlike propensities were finally 
overcome, — for his wife, the imperious duchess, 
quarrelled with Queen Anne, — the ministry was 
changed, and the jealousies of Whitehall interfered with 
the campaigns in Flanders. Marlborough was displaced, 
and a peace patched up, which, under the name of the 
Peace of Utrecht, is quoted as showing what 
small fruits British diplomacy sometimes derives 
from British valour. Louis the Fourteenth, conquered 
at all points, his kingdom exhausted, and all his reputa- 
tion gone, saw his grandson in possession of the crown 
which had been the original cause of the war, and Great 
Britain rewarded for all her struggles by the empty glory 
of filling up the harbour of Dunkirk, and the scarcely 
more substantial advantage, as many considered it at 
the time, of retaining Gibraltar, a barren rock, and Mi- 
norca, a useless island. After this, we find a long period 
of inaction on the continent produce its usual effect. 
"When thirty years had passed without the foreign popu- 
lations having sight of the British grenadiers, they either 
forgot their existence altogether, or had persuaded theni- 
a.i). 1743. selves that the new generation had greatly de- 
a.d. 1745. teriorated from the old. It needed the victory of 
Dettingen, and the more glorious repulse of Fontenoy, 
to recall the soldiers of Oudenarde and Malplaquet. 

In the interval, amazing things had been going on. 
Even while the career of Marlborough was attended 
with such glory in arms, a peaceful achievement was 
accomplished of far more importance than all his victo- 
ries. An Act of Union between the two peoples who 
occupied the Isle was passed by both their Parliaments 
in 1707, and England and Scotland disappeared in their 
separate nationalities, to receive the more dignified ap- 
pellation of the Kingdom of Great Britain. This was a 



THE PRETENDER. 503 

statesman's triumph; for the popular feeling on both 
sides of the Tweed was against it. Scotland considered 
herself sold; and England thought she was cheated. 
Clauses were introduced to preserve, as far as possible, 
the distinctions which each thought it for its honour to 
keep up. National peculiarities exaggerated themselves 
to prevent the chance of being obliterated ; and. Scotch- 
men were never so Scotch, nor Englishmen ever so 
English, as at the time when these denominations were 
about to cease. As neighbours, with the mere tie be- 
tween them of being subjects of the same crown, they 
were on amicable and respectful terms. But when the 
alliance was proposed to be more intimate, their interests 
to be considered identical and the Parliaments to be 
merged in one, both parties took the alarm. " The pre- 
ponderating number of English members would scarcely 
be affected by the miserable forty-five votes reserved for 
the Scotch representatives," said Caledonia, stern and 
wild. " The compact phalanx of forty-five determined 
Scotchmen will give them the decision of every question 
brought before Parliament," replied England, with equal 
fear, — and equal misapprehension, as it happily turned 
out. When eight years had elapsed after this great 
event in our domestic history, with just sufficient experi- 
ence of the new machinery to find out some of its defects, 
it was put to the proof by an incident which might have 
been fatal to a far longer established system of govern- 
ment. This was a rebellion in favour of the exiled 
Stuarts. James the Third, whom we saw recognised by 
Louis the Fourteenth on the death of his father in 1701, 
made his appearance among the Highlanders of the 
North in 1714, and summoned them to support his 
family claims. 

But the memory of his ancestors was too recent. 
Men of middle age remembered James the Second in 



504 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

Lis tyrannical supremacy at Holyrood. The time was 
not sufficiently remote for romance to have gathered 
round the harsh reality and hidden its repulsive out- 
lines. A few months showed the Pretender the hope- 
lessness of his attempt; and the tranquillity of the 
country was considered to be re-established when the 
adherents of the losing cause were visited with the 
harshest penalties. The real result of these vindictive 
punishments was, that they added the spirit of revenge 
for private wrong to the spirit of loyalty to the banished 
line. Many circumstances concurred to favour the de- 
feated candidate, who seemed to require to do nothing 
but bide his time. The throne was no longer held, even 
under legalized usurpation, as the discontented expressed 
it, by one of the ancient blood. A foreigner, old and 
, M , stupid, had come over from Hanover and claimed 

A.D. 1714. *■ ' 

the Parliamentary crown, and the few remain- 
ing links of attachment which kept the high-prerogative 
men and the Roman Catholics inactive in the reign of 
Queen Anne, the daughter of their rightful king, lost all 
their power over them on the advent of George the 
Pirst, who had to trace up through mother and grand- 
mother till he struck into the royal pedigree in the reign 
of James the Pirst. It was thought hard that descent 
from that champion of monarchic authority and heredi- 
tary right should be pleaded as a title to a crown depend- 
ent on the popular choice. As years passed on, the 
number of the discontented was of course increased. 
Whoever considered himself neglected by the intrusive 
government turned instinctively to the rival house. A 
courtier offended by the brutal manners of the Hanover- 
ian rulers looked longingly across the sea to the descend- 
ant of his lineal kings. The foreign predilections, and 
still more foreign English, of the coarse-minded Georges, 
made them unpopular with the weak or inconsiderate, 



SOUTH-SEA BUBBLE. 505 

who did not see that a very inelegant pronunciation 
might be united with a true regard for the interests of 
their country. 

The commercial passions of the nations succeeded to 
the military enthusiasm of the past age, and brought 
their usual fruits of selfish competition and social degra- 
dation. Money became the most powerful principle of 
public and private life : Sir Eobert Walpole, a man of 
perfect honesty himself, founded his ministry on the 
avowed disbelief of personal honesty among all classes 
of the people; and there were many things 
which appeared to justify his incredulity. There 
was the South-Sea Bubble, a swindling speculation, to 
which our own railway-mania is the only parallel, where 
lords and ladies, high ecclesiastics and dignified office- 
bearers, the highest and the lowest, rushed into the 
wildest excesses of gambling and false play, and which 
caused a greater loss of character and moral integrity 
than even of money to its dupes and framers. There 
was the acknowledged system of rewarding a ministerial 
vote with notes for five hundred or a thousand pounds. 
There were the party libels of the time, all imputing the 
greatest iniquities to the object of their vituperation, 
and left uncontradicted except by savage proceedings 
at law or by similar insinuations against the other side. 
There were philosophers like Bolingbroke and clergy- 
men like Swift. But let us distinguish between the per- 
formers on the great scenes of life, the place-hunter at 
St. James's, and the great body of the English and Scot- 
tish gentry, and their still undepraved friends and neigh- 
bours, whom it is the fashion to involve in the same con- 
demnation of recklessness and dishonour. We are to 
remember that the dregs of the former society were not 
yet cleared away. The generation had been brought up 
at the feet of the professors of morality and religion as 



506 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 



they were practised in the clays of Charles and James, 
with Congreve and Wy cherry for their exponents on the 
stage and Dryden for their poet-laureate. 

It seems a characteristic of literature that it becomes 
pure in proportion as it becomes powerful. While it is 
the mere vehicle for amusement or the exercise of wit 
and fancy, it does not care in what degrading quarters 
its materials are found. But when it feels that its voice 
is influential and its lessons attended to by a wider audi- 
ence, it rises to the height of the great office to which it 
is called, and is dignified because it is conscious of its 
authority. In the incontestable amendment visible in 
the writings of the period of Anne and the Georges, we 
find a proof that the vices of the busy politicians and 
gambling speculators were not shared by the general 
public. The papers of the Spectator and Tatler, the 
writings of Pope and Arbuthnot, were not addressed to 
a depraved or sensualized people, as the works of Ro- 
chester and Sedley had been. "When we talk, therefore, 
of the Augustan age of Anne, we are to remember that 
its freedom from grossness and immorality is still more 
remarkable than its advance in literary merit, and we 
are to look on the conduct of intriguing directors and 
bribed members of Parliament as the relics of a time 
about to pass away and to give place to truer ideas of 
commercial honesty and public duty. The country, in 
spite of coarseness of manners and language, was still 
sound at heart. The jolly squire swore at inconvenient 
seasons and drank beyond what was right, but he kept 
open house to friend and tenant, administered justice to 
the best of his ability, had his children Christianly and 
virtuously brought up, and was a connecting link in his 
own neighbourhood between the great nobles who affected 
almost a princely state, and the snug merchant in the 
country town, or retired citizen from London, whom he 



THE PRETENDER. 607 

met at the weekly club. The glimpses we get of the 
social status of the country gentlemen of Queen Anne 
make us enamoured of their simple ways and patriarchal 
position. For the argument to be drawn from the cha- 
racter and friends of Sir Eoger de Coverly and the de- 
lightful Lady Lizard and he** daughters, is that the great 
British nation was still the home of the domestic affec- 
tions, that the behaviour was pure though the grammar 
was a little faulty, and the ideas modest and becoming 
though the expression might be somewhat unadorned. 
Hence it was that, when the trial came, the heart of all 
the people turned to the uninviting but honest man who 
filled the British throne. George the Second became a 
hero, because the country was healthy at the core. 

A son of the old Pretender, relying on the lax morality 
of the statesmen and the venality of the courtiers, forgot 
the unshaken firmness and dogged love of the right 
which was yet a living principle among the populations 
of both the nations, and landed in the North of Scotland 
in 1745, to recover the kingdom of his ancestors by force 
of arms. The kingdoms, however, had got entirely out 
of the habit of being recovered by any such means. The 
law had become so powerful, and was so guarded by forms 
and precedents, that Prince Charles Edward would have 
had a better chance of obtaining his object by an action 
of ejectment, or a suit of recovery, than by the aid of 
sword and bayonet. Everybody knows the main inci- 
dents of this romantic campaign, — the successful battles 
which gave the insurgents the apparent command of the 
Lowlands,— the advance into England, — the retreat from 
Derby, — the disasters of the rebel army, and its final ex- 
tinction at Culloden. But, although to us it appears a 
very serious state of affairs, — a crown placed on the arbi- 
trament of war, battles in open field, surprise on the part 
of the Hanoverians, and loud talking on the part of their 



508 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 



rivals, — the tranquillity of all ranks and in all quarters 
is the most inexplicable thing in the whole proceeding. 
When the landing was first announced, alarm was of 
course felt, as at a fair when it is reported that a tiger 
has broken loose from the menagerie. But in a little time 
every thing resumed its ordinary appearance. George 
himself cried, " Pooh ! pooh ! Don't talk to me of such 
nonsense." His ministers, who probably knew the state 
of public feeling, were equally unconcerned. A few 
troops were brought over from the Continent, to show 
that force was not wanting if the application of it was 
required. But in other respects no one appeared to be- 
lieve that the assumed fears of the disaffected, and the 
no less assumed exultation of the Jacobites, had any 
foundation in fact. Trade, law, buying and selling, 
writing and publishing, went on exactly as before. The 
march of the Pretender was little attended to, except 
perhaps in the political circles in London. In the great 
towns it passed almost unheeded. Quiet families within 
a few miles of the invaders' march posted or walked 
across to see the uncouth battalions pass. Their strange 
appearance furnished subjects of conversation for a 
month ; but nowhere does there seem to have been the 
terror of a real state of war, — the anxious waiting for 
intelligence, "the pang, the agony, the doubt:" no one 
felt uneasy as to the result. England had determined 
to have no more Stuart kings, and Scotland was begin- 
ning to feel the benefit of the Union, and left the defence 
of the true inheritor to the uninformed, discontented, 
disunited inhabitants of the hills. "When the tribes 
emerged from their mountains, they seemed to melt like 
their winter snows. No squadrons of stout-armed cava- 
liers came to join them from holt and farm, as in the 
days of the Great Eebcllion, when the royal flag was 
raised at Nottingham. Puritans and Independents took 



CULLODEN. 509 

no heed, and cried no cries about "the sword of the Lord 
and of Gideon." They had turned cutlers at Sheffield 
and fustian-makers at Manchester. The Prince found 
not only that he created no enthusiasm, but no alarm, — 
a most painful thing for an invading chief; and, in fact, 
when they had reached the great central plains of Eng- 
land they felt lost in the immensity of the solitude that 
surrounded them. If they had met enemies they would 
have fought ; if they had found friends they would have 
hoped; but they positively wasted away for lack of either 
confederate or opponent. The expedition disappeared 
like a small river in sand. What was the use of going 
on ? If they reached London itself, they would be swal- 
lowed up in the vastness of the population, and, instead 
of meeting an army, they would be in danger of being 
taken up by the police. So they reversed their steps. 
Donald had stolen considerably in the course of the foray, 
and was anxious to go and invest his fortune in his na- 
tive vale. An English guinea — a coin hitherto as fabu- 
lous as the Bodacli glas — would pay the rent of his hold- 
ing for twenty years; five pounds would make him a 
cousin of the Laird. But Donald never got back to dis- 
play the spoils of Carlisle or Derby. He loitered by the 
road, and was stripped of all his booty. He was im- 
prisoned, and hanged, and starved, and beaten, and 
finally, after the strange tragi-comedy of his 
fight at Falkirk, had the good fortune, on that 
bare expanse of Drummossie Moor, to hide some of the 
ludicrous features of his retreat in the glory of a war- 
rior's death. Justice became revenge by its severity 
after the insurrection was quelled. The followers of the 
Prince were punished as traitors; but treason means 
rebellion against an acknowledged government, which 
extends to its subjects the securities of law. These did 
not exist in the Highlands. All those distant popula- 

43* 



51 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

tions knew of law was the edge of its sword, not the 
balance of its scales. They saw their chiefs depressed, 
they remembered the dismal massacre of Glencoe in 
William's time, and the legal massacres of G-eorge the 
First's. They spoke another language, were different in 
blood, and manners, and religion, and should have been 
treated as prisoners of war fighting under a legal banner, 
and not drawn and quartered as revolted subjects. It is 
doubtful if one man in the hundred knew the name of 
the king he was trying to displace, or the position of the 
prince who summoned him to his camp. Poor, gallant, 
warm-hearted, ignorant, trusting Gael ! His chieftain 
told him to follow and slay the Saxons, and he required 
no further instruction. He was not cruel or bloodthirsty 
in his strange advance. He had no personal enmity to 
Scot or Englishman, and, with the simple awe of child- 
hood, soon looked with reverence on the proofs of wealth 
and skill which met him in the crowded cities and culti- 
vated plains. He was subdued by the solemn cathedrals 
and grand old gentlemen's seats that studded all the 
road, as some of his ancestors, the ancient Gauls, had 
been at the sight of the Roman civilization. And, for all 
these causes, the incursion of the Jacobites left no last- 
ing bitterness among the British peoples. Pity began 
before long to take the place of opposition ; and when 
all was quite secure, and the Highlanders were fairly 
subdued, and the Pretender himself was sunk in sloth 
and drunkenness, a sort of morbid sympathy with the 
gallant adventurers arose among the new generation. 
Tender and romantic ballads, purporting to be "La- 
ments for Charlie," and declarations of attachment to 
the " Young Chevalier," were composed by comfortable 
ladies and gentlemen, and sung in polished drawing- 
rooms in Edinburgh and London with immense applause. 
Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Eome," or Aytoun's "Lays 



LITERATURE. 



511 



of the Scottish Cavaliers/' have as much right to be 
called the contemporary expression of the sacrifice of 
"Virginia or the burial of Dundee as the Jacobite songs 
to be the living voice of the Forty-Five. Who was there 
in the Forty-Five, or Forty-Six, or for many years after 
that date, to write such charming verses ? The High- 
landers themselves knew not a word of English; the 
blue bonnets in Scotland were not addicted to the graces 
of poetry and music. The citizens of England were too 
busy, the gentlemen of England too little concerned in 
the rising, to immortalize the landing at Kinloeh-Moidart 
or the procession to Holyrood. The earliest song which 
commemorates the Pretender's arrival, or laments his 
fall, was not written within twenty years of his attempt. 
By that time George the Third was on the safest throne 
in Europe, and Great Britain was mistress of the trade 
of India and the illimitable regions of America. It was 
easy to sing about having our "rightful King," when 
we were in undisputed possession of the Ganges and the 
Hudson and had just planted the British colours on 
Quebec and Montreal. 

This rebellion of Forty-Five, therefore, is remarkable 
as a feature in this century, not for the greatness of the 
interest it excited, but for the small effect it had upon 
either government or people. It showed on what firm 
foundations the liberties and religion of the nations 
rested, that the appearance of armed enemies upon our 
soil never shook our justly-balanced state. The courts 
sat at Westminster, and the bells rang for church. 
People read Thomson's " Seasons/' and wondered at 
Garrick in " Hamlet" at Drury Lane. 

Meantime, a great contest was going on abroad, which, 
after being hushed for a while by the peace of 1748, broke 
a.d. 1756 out with fiercer vehemence than ever in what 

-1763. is called the Seven Years' War. The military 



512 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

hero of this period was Frederick the Second of Prussia, 
by whose genius and skill the kingdom he succeeded 
to — a match for Saxony or Bavaria — rapidly assumed 
its position as a first-rate power. A combination of 
all the old despotisms was formed against him, — not, 
however, without cause; for a more unprincipled re- 
mover of his neighbour's landmarks, and despiser of 
generosity and justice, never appeared in history. But 
when he was pressed on one side by Russia and Austria, 
and on the other by France, and all the little German 
potentates were on the watch to pounce on the unpro- 
tected State and get their respective shares in the gene- 
ral pillage, Frederick placed his life upon the cast, and 
stood the hazard of the die in many tremendous combats, 
crushed the belligerents one by one, made forced marches 
which caught them unawares, and, though often defeated, 
conducted his retreats so that they yielded him all the 
fruits of victory. In his extremity he sought and found 
alliances in the most unlikely quarters. Though a self- 
willed despot in his own domains, he won the earnest 
support and liberal subsidies of the freedom-loving Eng- 
lish; and though a philosopher of the most amazing 
powers of unbelief, he awakened the sympathy of all the 
religious Protestants in our land. All his faults were 
forgiven — his unchivalrous treatment of the heroic King 
of Hungary, Maria-Theresa, the Empress-Queen, his as- 
saults upon her territory, and general faithlessness and 
ambition — on the one strong ground that he opposed 
Catholics and tyrants, and, though irreligious and even 
scoffing himself, was at the head of a true-hearted Pro- 
testant people. 

It is not unlikely the instincts of a free nation led us 
at that time to throw our moral weight, if nothing more, 
into the scale against the intrusion of a new and untried 
power which began to take part in the conflicts of Eu- 



WILLIAM PITT. 



518 



rope; for at this period we find the ill-omened announce- 
ment that the Russians have issued from their deserts a 
hundred thousand strong, and made themselves masters 
of most of the Prussian provinces. Though defeated in 

„„ „ the great battle of Zorndorf, they never lost the 
a.d. 1758. & . ■• i " -i i 

hope of renewing the march they had made 
eleven years before, when thirty-five thousand of them 
had rested on the Rhine. But Britain was not blind 
either to the past or future. At the head of our affairs 
was a man whose fame continues as fresh at the present 
hour as in the day of his greatness. William Pitt had 
been a cornet of horse, and even in his youth had attracted 
the admiration and hatred of old Sir Robert Walpole 
by an eloquence and a character which the world has 
agreed in honouring with the epithet of majestic ; and 
when war was again perplexing the nations, and Britain, 
as usual, had sunk to the lowest point in the military 
estimate of the Continent, the Great Commoner, as he 
was called, took the government into his hands, and the 
glories of the noblest periods of our annals were imme- 
diately renewed or cast into the shade. Wherever the 
Great Commoner pointed with his finger, success was 
certain. His fleets swept the seas. Howe and Hawke 
and Boscawen executed his plans. In the East he was 
answered by the congenial energy of Clive, and in the 
West by the heroic bravery of Wolfe. For, though the 
war in which we were now engaged had commenced 
nominally for European interests, the crash of arms be- 
tween France and England extended to all quarters of 
the world. In India and America equally their troops 
and policies were opposed, and, in fact, the battle of the 
two nations was fought out in those distant realms. 
Our triumph at Plassey and on the Heights of Abraham 
had an immense reaction on both the peoples at home. 
And a very cursory glance at those regions, from the 
2H 



614 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

middle of the century, will be a fitting introduction to 
the crowning event of the period we have now reached, 
— namely, the French Eevolution of 1789. The rise of 
the British Empire in the East, no less than the loss of 
our dominion in the West, will be found to contribute to 
that grand catastrophe, of which the results for good 
and evil will be felt a to the last syllable of recorded 
time/' 

The first commercial adventure to India was in the 
bold days of Elizabeth, in 1591. In the course of a 
hundred years from that time various companies had 
been established by royal charter, and a regular trade 
had sprung up. In 1702 all previous charters were con- 
solidated into one, and the East India Company began 
its career. Its beginning was very quiet and humble. 
It was a trader, and nothing more; but when it saw a 
convenient harbour, a favourable landing-place, and an 
industrious population, it bent as lowly as any Oriental 
slave at the footstool of the unsuspecting Rajah, and 
obtained permission to build a storehouse, to w T iden the 
wharf, and, finally, to erect a small tower, merely for 
the defence of its property from the dangerous inhabit- 
ants of the town. The storehouses became barracks, 
the towers became citadels; and by the year 1750 the 
recognised possessions of the inoffensive and unambi- 
tious merchants comprised mighty states, and were 
dotted at intervals along the coast from Surat and Bom- 
bay on the west to Madras and Calcutta on the east and 
far north. The French also had not been idle, and 
looked out ill pleased, from their domains at Pondi- 
cherry and Chandernagore, on the widely-diffused set- 
tlements and stealthy progress of their silent rivals. 
They might have made as rapid progress, and secured 
as extensive settlements, if they had imitated their 
rivals' stealthiness and silence. But power is nothing 



CLIVE. 515 

in the estimation of a Frenchman unless he can wear it 
like a court suit and display it to all the world. The 
governors, therefore, of their factories, obtained honours 
and ornaments from the native princes. One went so 
far as to forge a gift of almost regal power from the 
Great Mogul, and sat on a musnud, and was addressed 
with prostration by his countrymen and the workmen 
in the warerooms. Wherever the British wormed their 
way, the French put obstacles in their path. Whether 
there was peace between Paris and London or not, 
made no difference to the rival companies on the Coro- 
mandel shore. They were always at war, and only 
cloaked their national hatred under the guise of sup- 
porters of opposite pretenders to some Indian throne. 
Great men arose on both sides. The climate or policies 
of Hindostan, which weaken the native inhabitant, 
only call forth the energies and manly virtues of the 
intrusive settler. ~No kingdom has such a bead-roll of 
illustrious names as the British occupation. That one 
century of " work and will" has called forth more self- 
reliant heroism and statesmanlike sagacity than any 
period of three times the extent since the Norman Con- 
quest. From Clive, the first of the line, to the Law- 
rences and Havelocks of the present day, there has 
been no pause in the patriotic and chivalrous procession. 
Clive came just at the proper time. A born general, 
though sent out in an humble mercantile situation, he 
retrieved the affairs of his employers and laid the found- 
ation of a new empire for the British crown. Calcutta 
had been seized by a native ruler, instigated by the 
French, in 1756. The British residents, to the number 
of one hundred and forty-six, were packed in a frightful 
dungeon without a sufficiency of light or air, and, after 
a night which transcends all nights of suffering and 
despair, when the prison-doors were thrown open, but 



516 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

twenty-two of the whole number survived. But these 
were twenty-two living witnesses to the tyranny and 
cruelty of Surajah Dowlat. Clive was on his track ere 
many months had passed. Calcutta was recovered, 
other places were taken, and the battle of Plassey 
fought. In this unparalleled exploit, Clive, with three 
thousand soldiers, principally Sepoys, revenged the 
victims of the Black Hole, by defeating their murderer 
at the head of sixty thousand men. This was on the 
23d of June, 1757; and when in that same year the 
news of the great European war between the nations 
came thundering up the Granges, the victors enlarged 
their plans. They determined to expel the French 
from all their possessions in the East; and Admiral 
Pococke and Colonel Coote were worthy rivals of the 
gallant Clive. Great fleets encountered in the Indian 
seas, and victory was always with the British flag. 
Battles took place by land, and uniformly with the 
same result. Closer and closer the invading lines con- 
verged upon the French; and at last, in 1761, Pondi- 
cherry, the last remaining of all their establishments, 
was taken, after a vigorous defence, and the French 
influence was at an end in India. These four years, 
from 1757 to 1761, had been scarcely less prolific of 
distinguished men on the French side than our own. 
The last known of these was Lally Tollendal, a man of 
a furious courage and headstrong disposition, against 
whom his enemies at home had no ground of accusa- 
tion except his want of success and savageness of manner. 
Yet when he returned, after the loss of Pondicherry 
and a long imprisonment in England, he was attacked 
with all the vehemence of personal hatred. He was 
tried for betraying the interests of the king, tortured, 
and executed. The prosecution lasted many years, and 
the public rage seemed rather to increase. Long after 



CONQUEST OF CANADA. Ml 

peace was concluded between France and England, 

„.v,„ the tragedy of the French expulsion from India 
a.d. 1766. . . 

received its final scene in the death of the unfor- 
tunate Count Lally. 

Quebec and its dependencies, during the same glorious 
administration, were conquered and annexed by Wolfe; 
and already the throes of the great Revolution were 
felt, though the causes remained obscure. Cut off from 
the money-making regions of Hindostan and the patri- 
archal settlements of Canada, the Frenchman, oppressed 
at home, had no outlet either for his ambition or dis- 
content. The feeling of his misery was further aggra- 
vated by the sight of British prosperity. The race of 
men called Nabobs, mercantile adventurers who had 
gone out to India poor and came back loaded with 
almost incredible wealth, brought the ostentatious habits 
of their Oriental experience with them to Europe, and 
offended French and English alike by the tasteless profu- 
sion of their expense. Money wrung by extortion from 
native princes was lavished without enjoyment by the de- 
nationalized parvenu. A French duke found himself out- 
glittered by the equipage of the over-enriched clove-dealer, 
— and hated him for his presumption. The Frenchman 
of lower rank must have looked on him as the lucky and 
dishonourable rival who had usurped his place, and 
hated him for the opportunity he had possessed of win- 
ning all that wealth. Ground to the earth by taxes and 
toil, without a chance of rising in the social scale or of 
escaping from the ever-growing burden of his griefs, 
the French peasant and small farmer must have listened 
with indignation to the accounts of British families of 
their own rank emerging from a twenty years' resi- 
dence in Madras or Calcutta with more riches than 
half the hereditary nobles. It was therefore with a 
feeling of unanimous satisfaction that all classes of 

44 



618 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 



Frenchmen heard, in 1773, that the old English colonies 
in America were filled with disaffection, — that Boston 
had risen in insurrection, and that a spirit of resistance 
to the mother-country was rife in all the provinces. 

The quarrel came to a crisis between the Crown and 
the colonies within fourteen years of the conquest of 
Canada. It seemed as if the British had provided them- 
selves with a new territory to compensate for the ap- 
proaching loss of the old; and bitter must have been 
the reflection of the French when they perceived that 
the loyalty of that recent acquisition remained undis- 
turbed throughout the succeeding troubles. Taxation, 
the root of all strength and the cause of all weakness, 
had been pushed to excess, not in the amount of its 
exaction, but in the principle of its imposition; and the 
British blood had not been so colonialized as to submit 
to what struck the inhabitants of all the towns as an 
unjustifiable exercise of power. The cry at first, there- 
fore, was, ~No tax without representation; but the cry 
waxed louder and took other forms of expression. The 
cry was despised, whether gentle or loud, — then listened 
to, — then resented. The passions of both countries 
became raised. America would not submit to dictation; 
Britain would not be silenced by threats. Feelings 
which would have found vent at home in angry speeches 
in Parliament, and riots at a new election, took a far 
more serious shape when existing between populations 
separated indeed by a wide ocean, but identical in most 
of their qualities and aspirations. The king has been 
blamed. " George the Third lost us the colonies by his 
obstinacy : he would not yield an inch of his royal 
dignity, and behold the United States our rivals and 
enemies, — perhaps some day our conquerors and op- 
pressors !" Now, we should remember that the Great 
Britain of 1774 was a very narrow-minded, self-opinion- 



AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 519 

ated, pig-headed Great Britain, compared to the cosmo- 
politan, philanthropical, and altogether disinterested 
Great Britain we call it now. If the king had bated 
his breath for a moment, or even spoken respectfully 
and kindly of the traitors and rebels who were firing 
upon his flags, he would have been the most unpopular 
man in his dominions. Many, no doubt, held aloof, and 
found excuses for the colonists' behaviour; but the influ- 
ence of those meditative spirits was small ; their voice 
was drowned in the chorus of indignation at what 
appeared revolt and mutiny more than resistance to 
injustice. And when other elements came into the 
question, — when the French monarch, ostensibly at 
peace with Britain, permitted his nobles and generals 
and soldiers to volunteer in the patriot cause, — the senti- 
ments of this nation became embittered with its here- 
ditary dislike to its ancient foe. We turned them out 
of India : were they going to turn us out of America ? 
We had taken Canada : are they going to take JSFew 
York? We might have offered terms to our own 
countrymen, made concessions, granted exemptions from 
imperial burdens, or even a share in imperial legislation ; 
but with Lafayette haranguing about abstract freedom, 
and all the young counts and marquises of his expedi- 
a.d. 1778 tion declaring against the House of Lords, the 
-1780. thing was impossible. War was declared upon 
France, and upon Spain, and upon Holland. We fought 
everywhere, and lavished blood and treasure in this 
great quarrel. And yet the nation had gradually ac- 
customed itself to the new view of American wrongs. 
The Ministry, by going so far in their efforts at accom- 
modation, had confessed the original injustice of their 
cause. So we fought with a bluuted sword, and hailed 
even our victories with misgivings as to our right to 
win them. But it was the season of vast changes in 



520 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

the political distribution of all the world. Prussia was 
a foremost kingdom. Russia was a European Empire. 
India had risen into a compact dominion under the 
shield of Britain. Why should not America take a 
substantive place in the great family of nations, and 
play a part hereafter in the old game of statesmen, 
called the Balance of Power? In 1783 this opinion 
prevailed. France, Spain, and Holland sheathed their 
swords. The Independence of the United States was 
acknowledged at the Peace of Versailles, and every- 
body believed that the struggle against established 
governments was over. 

France seemed elevated by the results of the American 
War, and Great Britain humiliated. Prophecies were 
frequent about our rapid fall and final extinction. Our 
own orators were, as usual, the loudest in confessions 
of our powerlessness and decay. Our institutions were 
held up to dislike j and if you had believed the speeches 
and pamphlets of discontented patriots, you would have 
thought we were the most spiritless and down-trodden, 
the most unmerciful and dishonest, nation in the world. 
The whole land was in a fury of self-abasement at the 
degradation brought upon our name and standing by the 
treachery and iniquities of Warren Hastings in India ; 
our European glory was crushed by the surrender at 
Paris. It must be satisfactory to all lovers of their 
country to know that John Bull has no such satisfac- 
tion as in proving that he is utterly exhausted, — always 
deceived by his friends, always overreached by his ene- 
mies, always disappointed in his aims. In this self- 
depreciating spirit he conducts all his wars and all his 
treaties; yet somehow it always happens that he gets 
what he wanted, and the overreaching and deceiving 
antagonist gives it up. His power is over a sixth of the 
human race, and he began a hundred years ago with a 



BRITISH PROGRESS. 5 -1 

population of less than fourteen millions; and all the 
time he has been singing the most doleful ditties of the 
ill success that always attends him, — of his ruinous losses 
and heart-breaking disappointments. The men at the 
head of affairs in the trying years from the Peace of 
Yersailles to 1793 were therefore quite right not to be 
taken in by the querulous lamentations of the nation. 
We had lost three millions of colonists, and gained three 
million independent customers. We were trading to 
India, and building up and putting down the oldest 
dynasties of Hindostan. Ships and commerce increased 
in a remarkable degree; the losses of the war were com- 
pensated by the gains of those peaceful pursuits in a 
very few years ; and we were contented to leave to Paris 
the reputation of the gayest city in the world, and to 
the French the reputation of the happiest and best-ruled 
people. But Paris was the wretchedest of towns, and 
the French the most miserable of peoples. When any- 
body asks us in future what was the cause of the French 
Eevolution, we need not waste time to discuss the 
writings of Yoltaire, or the unbelief of the clergy, or 
the immorality of the nobles. We must answer at once 
by naming the one great cause by which all revolutions 
are produced, — over-taxation. The French peasant, sigh- 
ing for liberty, had no higher object than an escape from 
the intolerable burden of his payments. He cared no 
more for the rights of man, or the happiness of the 
human race, than for the quarrels of Achilles and Aga- 
memnon. He wanted to get rid of the "taille," the 
" corvee/' and twenty other imposts which robbed him 
of his last penny. If he had had a chicken in his pot, 
and could do as he liked with his own spade and pick- 
axe, he never would have troubled his head about codes 
and constitutions. But life had become a burden to him. 
Everybody had turned against him. The grand old 

44* 



522 EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 

feudal noble., who would have protected and cherished 
him under the shadow of his castle-wall, was a lord- 
chamberlain at court. The kind old priest, who would 
have attended to his wants and fed him, if required, at 
the church-door, was dancing attendance in the ante- 
chamber of a great lady in Paris, or singing improper 
songs at a jolly supper-party at Versailles. There were 
intendants and commissaries visiting his wretched hovel 
at rapidly-decreasing intervals of time, to collect his 
contributions to the revenue. These men farmed the 
taxes, and squeezed out the last farthing like a Turkish 
pasha. But while the small land-owner — and they were 
already immensely numerous — and the serf — for he was 
no better — were oppressed by these exactions, the gentry 
were exempt. The seigneur visited his castle for a month 
or two in the year, but it was to embitter the country- 
man's lot by the contrast. His property had many 
rights, but no duties. In ancient times in France, and 
at all times in England, those two qualities went together. 
Our upper classes lived among their tenants and depend- 
ants. They had no alleviation of burdens in consequence 
of their wealth, but they took care that their poorer 
neighbours should have alleviation in consequence of 
their poverty. Cottages had no window-tax. The press- 
ure of the public burdens increased with the power to 
bear them. But in France the reverse was the case. 
Poverty paid the money, and wealth and luxury spent 
it. The evil was too deep-rooted to be remedied with- 
out pulling up the tree. The wretched millions were 
starving, toiling, despairing, and the thousands were 
rioting in extravagance and show. The sarne thing oc- 
curred in 1789 as had occurred in the last glimmer of 
the Eoman civilization in the time of Clovis. The 
Roman Emperor issued edicts for the collection of his 
revenue. Commissioners spread over the land; the 



FRENCH DISCONTENT. 523 

miserable G-aul saw the last sheaf of his corn torn away, 
and the last lamb of his flock. But when the last pro- 
perty of the poorest was taken away, the imperial ex- 
chequer could not remain unfilled. You remember the 
unhappy men called Curials, — holders of small estates 
in the vicinity of towns. They were also endowed with 
rank, and appointed to office. Their office was to make 
up from their own resources, or by extra severity among 
their neighbours, for any deficiency in the sum assessed. 
Peasant, land-owner, curial, — all sank into hopeless 
misery by the crushing of this gold-producing ma- 
chinery. They looked across the Ehine to Clovis and 
the Franks, and hailed the ferocious warriors as their 
deliverers from an intolerable woe. They could not be 
worse off by the sword of the stranger than by the 
ledger of the tax-collector. In 1789 the system of the 
old Roman extortion was revived. The village or dis- 
trict was made a curial, and became responsible in its 
aggregate character for the individual payments. If the 
number of payers diminished, the increase fell upon the 
few who were not yet stripped. The Clovis of the pre- 
sent day who was to do away with their oppressors, 
though perhaps to immolate themselves, was a Revolu- 
tion, — a levelling of all distinctions, ranks, rights, exemp- 
tions, privileges. This was the " liberty, equality, fra- 
ternity" that were to overflow the worn-out world and 
fertilize it as the Nile does Egypt. 

Great pity has naturally been expressed for the no- 
bility (or gentry) and clergy of France \ but, properly 
considered, France had at that time neither a nobility 
nor a clergy. A nobility with no status independent of 
the king — with no connection with its estates beyond 
the reception of their rents — with no weight in the 
legislature ; with ridiculously exaggerated rank, and 
ridiculously contracted influence; with no interest in 



524 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 



local expenditure or voice in public management; a 
gentry, in short, debarred from active life, except as 
officers of the army — shut out by monarchic jealousy 
from interference in affairs, and by the pride of birth 
from the pursuits of commerce — is not a gentry at all. 
A clergy, in the same way, is a priesthood only in right 
of its belief in the doctrines it professes to hold, and the 
attention it bestows on its parishioners. Except in some 
few instances, the Christianity both of faith and practice 
had disappeared from France. It was time, therefore, 
that nobility and clergy should also disappear. The 
excesses of the Revolution which broke out in 1789, and 
reached their climax in the murder of the king in 1793, 
showed the excesses of the misgovernment of former 
years. If there had been one redeeming feature of the 
ancient system, it would have produced its fruits in the 
milder treatment of the victims of the reaction. In one 
or two provinces, indeed, we are told that hereditary 
attachment still bound the people to their superiors, and 
in those provinces, the philosophic chronicler of the fact 
informs us, the centralizing system had not completed 
its authority. The gentry still performed some of the 
duties of their station, and the priests, of their profes- 
sion. Everywhere else blind hatred, unreasoning hope, 
and bloody revenge. The century, which began with 
the vainglorious egotism of Louis the Fourteenth and 
the war of the Spanish Succession, — which progressed 
through the British masterdom of India and the self- 
sustaining republicanism of America, — died out in the 
convulsive stragglings of thirty-one millions of souls on 
the soil of France to breathe a purer political air and 
shake off the trammels which had gradually been riveted 
upon them for three hundred years. Great Britain had 
preceded them by a century, and has ever since shown 
the bloodless and legal origin of her freedom by the 



CLOSE OF THE CENTURY. 525 

bloodless and legal use she has made of it. We emerged 
from the darkness of 1688 with all the great landmarks 
of our country not only erect, but strengthened. We 
had king, lords, and commons, and a respect for law, 
and veneration for precedents, which led the great Duke 
of Wellington to say, in answer to some question about 
the chance of a British revolution, that "no man could 
foresee whether such a thing might occur or not, but, 
when it did, he was sure it would be done by Act of 
Parliament." 

War with France began in 1793. Our military repu- 
tation was at the lowest, for Wolfe and Clive had had 
time to be forgotten ; and even our navy was looked on 
without dismay, for the laurels of Howe and Boscawen 
were sere from age. But in the remaining years of the 
century great things were done, and Britannia had the 
trident firmly in her hand. Jervis, and Duncan, and 
Nelson, were answering with victories at sea the 
triumphs of Napoleon in Italy. And while fame was 
blowing the names of those champions far and wide, a 
blast came across also from India, where Wellesley had 
begun his wondrous career. Equally matched the bel- 
ligerents, and equally favoured with mighty men of 
valour to conduct their forces, the feverish energy of 
the newly-emancipated France being met by the health- 

H „ nn ful vigour of the matured and self-respecting 

a.d. 1798. . to . r & 

Britain, the world was uncertain how the great 

drama would close. But the last year of the century 

seemed to incline the scale to the British side. Na- 

,*«„ poleon, after a clash at Egypt, had been checked 
a.d. 1799. x 0</ x 7 

by the guns of Nelson in the great battle of the 
Nile. He secretly withdrew from his dispirited army, 
and made his appearance in Paris as much in the cha- 
racter of a fugitive as of a candidate for power. But all 
the fruits of his former battles had been torn from his 



526 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 



countrymen in his absence. Italy was delivered from 
their grasp; Eussia was pouring her hordes into the 
South; confusion was reigning everywhere, and the 
fleets of Great Britain were blocking up every harbour 
in France. 

Napoleon was created First Consul, and the Century 
went down upon the final ^preparations of the embittered 
rivals. Both parties felt now that the struggle was for 
life or death, and "the boldest held his breath for a 
time," when he thought of what awful events the Nine- 
teenth Century would be the scene. 



INDEX. 



Abdelmalek, the caliph, 167. 

A-Beckett, the elevation and career of, 
290 et seq. 

Abelard, rise of free mercury with, 280. 

Abou Beker, the exploits, &c. of, 157, 158 
— chosen Mohammed's successor, 160 — 
his exploits, 161. 

Absolutism, rise of, in France under Louis 
XIV., 475 et seq. 

Abu Taleb, uncle of Mohammed, 138. 

Academies, establishment of, by Charle- 
magne, 196. 

Adrian, the emperor, accession and reign 
of, 45 et seq. — his death, 48. 

Adrian IV., Pope, 289. 

Africa, progress of the Saracens in, 166 — 
trading-company to, 452. 

Agincourt. battle of, 381. 

Agriculture, state of, in seventh century, 
142. 

Agrippina, the empress, 22. 

Alans, the, 100. 

Alaric the Goth, first appearance of, 98 — 
hostilities with, 101 — sack of Rome, 106 
— his death and burial, 107. 

Albigenses, tenets, &c. of the, 299 — the cru- 
sade against them, 302 et seq. 

Albinus, a candidate for the empire, 60. 

Alboin, King of the Lombards, 129. 

Alcuinat the court of Charlemagne, 194 — 
as Abbot of Tours, 195. 

Aleppo taken by the Saracens, 163. 

Alexander VI., character, &c. of, 369, 406. 

Alexandria, the monks of, 115 — taken by 
the Saracens, and destruction of the 
library, 163. 

Alexis, the emperor, and the Crusaders, 
263. 

Alfred, rise and exploits of, 215. 

Ali becomes caliph, 167 — the exploits, &c. 
of, 157, 158, 160. 

Alva, the Duke of, the St. Bartholomew 
massacre planned with, 441 — his cruel- 
ties in the Netherlands, 441. 

Amadis de Gaul, the romance of. 349. 



America, the discovery of, 396 — growing 
importance of its discovery, 402 — pro- 
gress of British power in, 517. 

Amru, the Saracen conqueror, 163. 

Anagni, the arrest of Boniface VIII. at, 
329. 

Anglican Church, the, under Henry II., 
289 et seq. 

Anglo-Saxons, establishment of the, 120. 

Anne, the literature of the reign of, 506. 

Anselm, learning, &c. of, 247. 

Antharis, conquest of Italy by, 130. 

Antioch, the capture of, by the Crusaders, 
264— the battle of, 265. 

Antoninus Pius, the emperor, his character 
and reign, 49. 

Aquileia, siege of, by Maximin, 70 — taken 
by Attila, 110. 

Aquitaine, power of the Dukes of, 204, 232. 

Arcadius, the emperor, 101. 

Architecture, advancement of, during the 
eleventh century, 242, 243. 

Argentine, Sir Giles d', death of, 353. 

Arians. enmity between, and the orthodox, 
94 — quarrels between, and the Athana- 
sians, 117. 

Aristocracy, the Boman, their decay, 32 et 
seq v 

Aristotle, supremacy given to, 297. 

Armagnac, the Count of, 364: — struggle be- 
tween, and Burgundy, 377. 

Armies, the modern, of Europe, 57. 

Arnold of Brescia, the revolt of, 278 — his 
death, 279. 

Arteveldt, James Van, 355. 

Asia, stationary condition of, 14. 

Asti, siege of, by Alaric, 105. 

Ataulf the Goth, career of, 108. 

Athanasians. division between the, and the 
Arians, 117. 

Attila the Hun, career of, 109 et seq. 

Augustin, influence of, on Livther, 424. 

Augustus, the supremacy of, 17 — his reign, 
18. 

Aldus I'lautius, landing of, in England, 21. 

527 



528 



INDEX. 



Aurelian, the emperor, 72 — his triumph, 

79. 
Austrasia, kingdom of, 155. 
Austria, the power of, in the seventeenth 

century, 463 — the seven years' war, 512. 
Auvergne, the Marquises of, 205. 
Avars, junction of the Lombards with the, 

129. 
Avignon, acquired by the Pope, 306 — the 

residence of the Popes at, 342. 
Azores, discovery of the, 395. 

Bacon, Roger, gunpowder known to, 372. 

Badby, John, martyrdom of, 367. 

Bahuchet, a French admiral, 355. 

Balbinus, appointment of, 69 — his death, 
70. 

Baldwyn, Count of Flanders, 263 — habits 
of, in the East, 270. 

Baliol, maintained by Edward I., 319. 

Ballads, influence of, on the common peo- 
ple, 372. 

Bannockburn, the battle of, 352. 

Barbarians, first appearance of the, 25 — 
their increased incursions, 51 — their con- 
tinued progress, 71 — their increasing 
strength, 79 et seq. 

Barbavara, a Genoese admiral, 355. 

Barcho-chebas, the rebellion of the Jews 
under, 47. 

Bedford, the Duke of, in France, 384. 

Belisarius, exploits of, 124 — disgraced, 125. 

Bells, the invention of, 196. 

Benedict. See St. Benedict. 

Benedict XI. poisoned, 331. 

Benedictine monks, industry, &c. of the, 
142. 

Berenger, transubstantiation assailed by, 
247. 

Bernard de Goth, elevated to the papacy 
as Clement V., 331 et seq. 

Beziers, massacre of Albigenses in, 305. 

Bible, Wickliff 's translation of the, 342— 
the first book printed by Guttenberg, 
422. 

Bishops, increasing alarm of the, in the 
ninth century, 205 — warlike, of the 
eleventh century, 251. 

Black Hole of Calcutta, the tragedy of the, 
515. 

Blanche, mother of Louis IX., urges the 
persecution of the Albigenses, 304. 

Blenheim, the battle of, 500. 

Boccaccio, the works of, 344. 

Bohemund, the Crusader, 265. 

Boniface VII., Pope, 236. 

Boniface VIII., bull against Edward I. by, 
315 — jubilee celebrated by, 325 — contest 
with Philip le Bel, 326 et seq. — his arrest, 
329 et seq.— his death, 330. 

Boniface, Archbishop of Mayence, 175. 

Books, early value of, 372 — multiplied by 
printing, 373. 

Borgia, elevation of, to the Papacy, 369. 

Brantonie, the memoirs of, 447. 

Bribery, prevalence of, under Walpole, 505. 

Brittany, power of the Dukes of, 204 — ac- 
quired by Rollo the Norman, 226. 



Bruce, the victory of, at Bannockburn, 352. 

Bruges, defeat of the townsmen of, at Cas- 
sel, 353. 

Brunehild, cruelties and career of, 150 — ■ 
her death, 150. 

Brunissende de Perigord, mistress of Cle- 
ment V., 332. 

Buccaneers, rise of the, 452. 

Burghers, increasing importance of the, 
279. 

Burgundians, conquest of Gaul by the, 108. 

Burgundy, kingdom of, 155. 

Busentino, burial of Alaric in the, 107. 

Cade, the insurrection of, 374. 

Cadijah, wife of Mohammed, 138. 

Calais, taken by Edward III., 356. 

Caligula, the character, &c. of, 19. 

Caliphs, habits of the, 165. 

Calvinists and Lutherans, hatred between, 
460. 

Cambrai, the league of, 409 et aeq. 

Canada, the conquest of, by the British, 517. 

Cannon, first employment of, 342. 

Capetian line, commencement of the, 231. 

Caracalla, character of, 62 — his accession 
and reign, 65. 

Carausius, the revolt of, 75. 

Carlovingian line, close of the, 231. 

Carthage, subdued by the Saracens, 166. 

Cassel, the battle of, 353. 

Cassius, the rebellion of, 52. 

Cathedrals, building of, during the eleventh 
century, 242. 

Catherine de Medicis, the massacre of St. 
Bartholomew planned by, 441. 

Catholicism, resemblances between, and 
Mohammedanism, 271. 

Cavendish, the naval exploits of, 451. 

Caxton, books printed by, 393. 

Celibacy, priestly, neglect of, during the 
eleventh century, 252 — enforced by Hil- 
debrand, 256. 

Centuries, characters of different, 13, 15, et 
seq. 

Chaereas, assassination of Caligula by, 20. 

Chalons, the battle of, 110. 

Change, prevalence of, during eighteenth 
century, 491. 

Charlemagne, accession and reign of, 186 
etseq. — his conquests, 187 — crowned Em- 
peror of the West, 188 — his era, 188 et seq. 
— his polity, &c, 189 — his court, &c, 
193, 194 et seq. — his encouragement of 
literature, &c, 195 et seq. — his death, 
and disruption of his empire, 198, 201 et 
seq. 

Charles, son of Louis the Debonnaire, 201 
— character and reign of, 206. 

Charles the Simple and Hollo the Norman, 
225, 226, 227. 

Charles VI., decline of the French nobility 
under, 360 el se?.— death of, 384. 

Charles VII., accession of, 384 — the Maid 
of Orleans, 386 et seq. — his desertion of 
her, 389. 

Charles IX., the massacre of St. Bartholo- 
mew, 442. 



INDEX. 



529 



Charles V., the emperor, extent of his do- 
minions, 404 — and Luther, 427 — close of 
his career, 431, 432. 

Charles I., unpopularity of, 4C5 — the exe- 
cution of, 470. 

Charles II., England under, 472 et seq. 

Charles II. of Spain, death of, and his will, 
497. 

Charles Edward, the rising under, 507. 

Charles Martel, the defeat of the Saracens 
by, 176, 179, et seq. 

Chatham, the ministry of, 513. 

Chaucer, the works of, 344. 

Childeric III., the last of the Merovingians, 
182. 

Chivalry, rise of the orders of, 344 — prin- 
ciples inculcated by, 349. 

Chosroes, King of Persia, 158. 

Christ, the birth of, and its influence, 17. 

Christian Church, progressive development 
of the, 76 — its organization, 78 — corrup- 
tion of the, 114— divisions in it, 116 — 
persecutions, 118. 

Christians, persecution of the, by Nero, 23 
— policy of Adrian towards, 49. 

Christianity, influence of, 17 — the first 
effects of, 36 — progress of, 55 —establish- 
ment of, by Constantine, 85 — commenc- 
ing struggle of, with Mohammedanism, 
141. 

Church, the privileges conferred on, and 
its advantages, 145 — corruptions, 147, 
14S — at variance with the nobility, 153 — 
its unity, 155 — state of, in England dur- 
ing eighth century, 172. 173 — monarchi- 
cal principle established in the, 183 — 
effects of the Crusades on, 273 — increas- 
ing pretensions and power of, 206, 207 — 
possessions. &c. of, in France in the tenth 
century, 228 — resistance to it, 230 — policy 
of Hugh Capet, 231 — state of, during the 
tenth century, 219 — during the eleventh 
century, 253 — in England under Henry 
II., 292 et seq. — conditions of Magna 
Charta regarding, 308 — changed position 
of, 342— state of, in the fifteenth century, 
368 et seq. — before the Reformation, 419 
et seq. 

Church of England, the, and its influence 
and tendencies, 457. 

Churches, schism between the Eastern and 
Western, 133 — rebuilding, &c. of the, in 
the eleventh century, 242 — their objects, 
&c, 244 et seq. 

Churchmen, warlike, during the eleventh 
century, 251. 

Citeaux, the Abbot of, 305. 

Claudius, reign and character of, 20 — his 
death, 22. 

Clement V., election of, 331, 332 — his ra- 
pacity, &c, 332 — the persecution of the 
Templars, 337 et seq. 

Clergy, the, privileges conferred on, 145 — 
corruption of the higher, 148 — increasing 
claims of, in the ninth century, 204 et 
seq. — claims of, in the tenth century, and 
resistance to them, 229 — policy of Hugh 
Capet, 232 — the higher, character of, 



during the twelfth century, 274 — charac- 
ter of, in Provence, 300 — taxed in Eng- 
land by Edward I., 315 — support Henry 
IV. in England, 365 — the French at the 
time of the Revolution, 523. 

Clive, the exploits of, 515. 

Clotaire, overthrow of Brunehild by, 150. 

Clothilde, anecdote of, 153. 

Clovis, accession of, in France, 119 — the 
descendants of, 175 — set aside, 182. 

Cobham, Lord, martyrdom of, 367. 

Colonies, the first English and Dutch, 454. 

Colonna, the arrest of Boniface "VIII. by, 
329. 

Columbus, the career of, and his discovery 
of America, 395. 

Commerce, progress of, in England under 
Elizabeth, 449 et seq. 

Commodus, accession and character of, 58 
et seq. 

Commons, rise of the, in England, 306 — 
House of, first constituted in England, 
311. 

Conde, the Great, 478, 481. 

Conrad, the emperor, heads the second 
Crusade, 284. 

Conservatism, strength of, in England dur- 
ing eighteenth century, 494. 

Constantine, accession of, and removal to 
Constantinople, 84 — his character, 85 — 
establishes Christianity, 85 — his system 
of government, 86 — nobility founded by 
him, 87 — his system of taxation, 89 — 
death, 92. 

Constantinople, removal of the seat of em- 
pire to, 84 — subordination of the Bishop 
of, 125 — supremacy claimed for the Bi- 
shop of, 132, 133 — assailed by the Sara- 
cens, 166 — early subordination of the 
Popes to, 174 — pretensions of the em- 
perors, 176, 177 — the Crusaders at, 262, 
263 — diffusion of learning by capture of, 
422. 

Convents, state of the, during the tenth 
century, 221. 

Coote, Sir Eyre, 516. 

Cornelius and Novatian, the schism be- 
tween, 78. 

Council of Toledo, the, 151. 

Count, origin of the title of, 88. 

Courtrai, the battle of, 335. 

Covenanters, persecutions of the, in Scot- 
land, 473. 

Crecy, battle of, 356. 

Cromwell, the rise &c. of, 470 — England 
under, 471. 

Crown, position of the, in England and 
France during the tenth century, 230 — 
new position given to the, under Hugh 
Capet, 233 et seq. — its increasing power, 
359 et seq. 

Crusades, first suggestion of the, 242 — the 
first, 260 et seq. — losses in it, and its 
effects on Europe, 269— of children, 269 
—the second, 284— the third, 285— influ- 
ence of, on the distribution of wealth, 
Ac, 272— end of. 316. 

Crusading spirit, first rise of the, 250. 



2 T 



45 



530 



INDEX. 



Cuba, the buccaneers at, 453. 
Culloden, the battle of, 507, 509. 
Cuniinond, defeat and death of, 129. 
Curials, the, under the Roman emperors, 

9), 523. 
Cyrene, conquest of, by the Saracens, 166. 

Dagobert, King, 151. 

Dance of Death, the, 374. 

Danes, the invasions of the, 209, 210 — tfieir 
invasions of England, 212 e.{ seq. — their 
settlements, 214, 215 — continued incur- 
sions into England, 234. 

Dante, the works of, 325, 344. 

Democracy, early alliance of the Church 
with, 154. 

Dettingen, the battle of, 502. 

Diaz, Bartholomew, disco-very of the Cape 
of Good Hope by, 395. 

Didius, purchase of the empire by, 59 — his 
death, 00. 

Diocletian, accession and reign of, 74 — 
ahdicates, 76 — system introduced by him, 
83. 

Dominic, originates the crusade against 
the Alhigonses, 301 et seq. — establish- 
ment of the Inquisition under, 304. 

Domitian, the reign of, 28, 34. 

Dorylaeum, the battle of, 204. 

Drake, the expeditions of, 451. 

Dress, distinctions from, among the Franks, 
152. 

Dudley, the informer, 404. 

Duncan, Ihe victories of, 525. 

Dunois, bastard of Orleans, 387. 

Dutch, the maritime settlements of the. 
452. 

East India Company, founding of the, 
450. 

Eastern Church, schism of the, 133. 

Eastern empire, falling supremacy of the, 
185. 

Ecclesiastical power, decay of, in the thir- 
teenth century, 313. 

Edessa, the Crusaders at, 264. 

Education, measures of Charlemagne for, 
195. 

Edward I., taxation of the clergy by, 315 
— character of the reign of, 318 — his at- 
tempts on Scotland, 319 et seq. 

Edward II., the defeat of, atBannockburn, 
352. 

Edward TII.,the Garter instituted by, 344 — 
nolicy of, his alliance with Flanders, &c, 
354 et seq. — war with France, 355 et seq. 
—battles of Helvoet Sluys and Crecy, 
:',:,:") — of Poictiers, 356. 

Edward the Black Prince, his treatment of 
.John, 349 — his character, 349 — his vic- 
tory at Poitiers, 356. 

Egbert, subjugation of the Heptarchy by, 
1 93, 194. 

Fginhart, the life of Charlemagne by, 
195. 

Egypt, surrender of Louis IX. in, 317. 

Eleanor, wife of Louis VII., 286. 

Elizabeth, policy of, with regard to the 



Reformation, 428 — the policy and mea- 
sures of, and their results, ioQ et seq. — 
the Armada, 444 — papa] bull against, 
44S — changes in England under, 44'*. 

Elizabeth, daughter of James I., married 
to the Elector of Palatine, 462. 

Ella, King of Northumberland, 214. 

Eloisa, influence of, 282. 

Empire of the West, restoration of, under 
Charlemagne, 188. 

Empson, the creature of Henry VII., 404. 

England, conquest of, by the Romans, and 
its effects, 21 — severance of, from the 
Roman Empire, 107 — formation of the 
Heptarchy in, 120 — state of, in the sixth 
century, 128 — divided state of, 155 — 
state of, in the eighth century, 171 — the 
Church and clergy, 172, 173— union of, 
under Egbert, 193, 194 — state of, in the 
ninth century, 211 et seq. — the invasions 
of the Danes. 212 — its divided state. 213, 
214 — settlements of the Danes, 215 — rise 
and career of Alfred, 215 — the Church 
and the Crown in, during the tenth cen- 
tury, 229 — state of, during the tenth 
century, 234 — origin of the wars with 
France, 285 et seq. — subservience to the 
papacy in, 289 — position of the Church, 
and feeling towards the Normans, 292 
— state of, under John, 294 — rise of the 
Commons, &c. in. 306- — Magna Charta 
and its effects, 308 et seq. — reign of Henry 
III., 311 — supremacy of the papacy iu, 
314— independence of the Church, 31e' — 
the reign of Edward I. in, 318 — the 
battle of Bannockburn, 352 — the policy 
of Edward III., 354 — decline of the no- 
bility in, 360 — divided state of, on acces- 
sion of Henry IV., 365 — the ballads of, 
372 — state of, during fifteenth century 
374 — loss of her French possessions, 376 
— conquests of Henry V. in France, 378 
et seq. — accession of Henry VIII., 404 — 
increasing commerce of, 413— first idea 
of union with Scotland, 414 — battle of 
Flodden, 414 — the reformation in, 428 — 
the reign of Mary in, 433 — the policy of 
Elizabeth and its results, 436 — progress 
of, under Elizabeth, 450 — the coloniza- 
tion of America by, 454 — under James 
1., 455 et seq. — state of parties, &c. on 
accession of Charles I., 465 et seq. — politi- 
cal and religious parties, 466 — the great 
rebellion. 468 — the reaction against Puri- 
tanism in, 472 — under Charles II., 472 — 
its degraded position, 473 — ingress of 
French Protestants into, 484 — reign of 
James II., 484— William III., 4S6— state, 
&c. of, during eighteenth century, 49:; — 
state of, under the Georges, 494 — is she 
a military nation? 496 — the war of the 
succession, 498 et seq. — the peace of 
Utrecht, 502 — the ministry of Walpole, 
Ac, 505 — the Pretender in, 509 — sup- 
ports Frederick the Great. 512 — the rise 
of her Indian empire, 514 et seq. — the 
revolt of the United States, 518 < i seq. — 
her progress, 520, 521 — her revolution 



INDEX. 



531 



and freedom contrasted with thoso of 
Fiance, 525. 

Episcopacy, James's attempt to force, on 
Scotland, 404. 

Ethelbald, the reign of, 214. 

Ethelwolf, the reign of, 214. 

Etiquette, supremacy of, under Louis XIV., 
481. 

Eugene, Prince, 501. 

Eugenius III., Pope, 279. 

Eunapius, character of the early monks 
by, 115. 

Europe, modern, compared with ancient 
Home, 56 et seq. — state of, in the seventh 
century, 167 — in the eighth, 171 — rise 
of the modern kingdoms of, 190 — state 
of, during the tenth century, 219 — effects 
of the first Crusade on, 269 — progressive 
advances of, 297 — state of, during fif- 
teenth century, 375 — changed aspect of, 
in sixteenth century, 431 — sensation 
caused by massacre of St. Bartholomew, 
442— changes in, during eighteenth cen- 
tury, 491, 492 — the seven years' war, 
512. 

Famines, frequency of, during the tenth 
century, 236. 

Faust and the invention of printing, 391. 

Favorinus the Grammarian, anecdote of, 
46. 

Ferdinand of Spain, a party to the league 
of Cambrai, 409 — declares war against 
France, 412. 

Ferdinand, the emperor, character and 
policy of, 462. 

Ferdinand and Isabella, union of Spain 
under, 403. 

Feudal organization, long retention of, in 
Scotland, 415. 

Feudal system, origin of the. 149. 

Feudalism, progress of, in the ninth cen- 
tury, 210 — full establishment of, 279 — 
decay of, 333, 341 — continued decline of, 
359. 

Fields of May or March in France, the, 
151. 

Fine arts, encouragement of, by Charle- 
magne, 196. 

Flagellants, tenets, &c. of the, 374. 

Flanders, power of the Dukes of, 232 — rise 
of the towns of, 277 — the alliance of Ed- 
ward III. with, 354. 

Flodden, battle of, and its effects, 414, 415, 
et seq. 

Fontenelle, the abbey of, 244. 

Fontenoy, the battle of, 502. 

France, accession of Clovis in. 119 — acces- 
sion of Pepin to crown of, 183 — position 
of, under Charlemagne, 198 — loses the 
boundary of the Rhine, 203 — power of 
the great nobles, 204 — state of, during 
the tenth century, 219 — settlement of 
Rollo in, 222 et seq. — possessions of the 
clergy in, 228 — accession of Hugh Capet, 
231 — his policy, 232 et seq. — its separa- 
tion from the empire, 233 — monasteries 
in, 244 — origin of the English wars, 285 



et seq. — the kings of, contrasted with the 
Plantagenots, 288 — acquisitions of. in 
Langucdoc, &c, 305 — reign of Louis IX. 
in, 311 et te(<. — the parliaments of, 312 
— supremacy of the papacy in, 314 — de- 
generacy of the clergy, 315 — indepen- 
dence of the church, 316 — subserviency 
of the Popes to, 342— title of King of, 
assumed by Edward TIL. 355 — depressed 
state of, at close of fourteenth century, 
356 — decline of the nobility in, 360 — 
state of, during fifteenth century, 374, 
375 — expulsion of the English from, 
376 — its history during the century. 376 
— career of Joan of Arc, 386 — accession of 
Francis I., 405 — a party to the league of 
Cambrai, 409 — the massacre of St. Bar- 
tholomew in, 442 — changes witnessed by 
Brantome in, 448 — rise of absolutism 
under Louis XIV. in, 475 et seq. — policy 
of Richelieu and reign of Louis XIII., 
476 et seq. — the revocation of the Edict 
of Nantes, 483 — changes in, during 
eighteenth century, 491 — contests in 
India and America with. 513 — the policy 
and overthrow of. in India, 514 et seq. — 
depression and discontent before the 
Revolution, 517 — aids the North Ameri- 
can colonies, 519 — causes of the Revolu- 
tion, 522 — general discontent, 523 — the 
Revolution, 524 et seq. 

Francis I., accession and character of, 405 
—death of, 431. 

Franks, tribes composing the, 71 — state of 
the, in the sixth century, 128 — institu- 
tions, &c. of the, 151 — divisions of their 
kingdom, 155. 

Frederick the Great, the career of, 512. 

Frederick, Elector Palatine, marriage of, 
to Elizabeth of England, 462. 

Frederick Barbarossa, capture, &c. of Rome 
by, 279. 

Free lances, the rise, &c. of. the, 350 et seq. 

Freedom, rise of, in England, 306 et seq. 

French ballads, the early, 372. 

French Revolution, the, 524 et seq. 

Fritigern, defeat of Valens by, 100. 

Froissart, the writings of, and their influ- 
ence, 347. 

Fronde, the wars of the, 478. 

Galba, the emperor, 24. 

Garter, institution of order of, 344. 

Gaul, severance of, from the Roman em- 
pire, 108. 

Gebhard, Elector of Cologne, 460. 

Genoa, prosperity of, during the Crusades, 
272— greatness of, 277. 

Genseric, sack of Rome by, 111. 

George I. and II., characters of, 494. 

George III., loyalty to, in England, 494 — 
the alleged loss of the United States by 
his obstinacy, 518. 

Georges, England under the, 494. 

Germans, defeat of the, by Probus, 73. 

Germany, state of, in the sixth century, 
128 — divided state of, 155 — separation 
between France and the Empire, and 



532 



INDEX. 



reign of Otlio the Great; 234 — progress, 
&c. of the Reformation in, 460 — ingress 
of French Huguenots into, 484. 

Geta, murder of, 65. 

Gibraltar, cession of, to England, 501. 

Gladiatorial shows, passion of the Itomans 
for, 34 et seq. 

Glo'ster, the Duke of, uncle of Henry VI., 
384. 

Godfrey of Bouillon, 263 — chosen King of 
Jerusalem, 266— his death, 270. 

Good Hope, Cape of, discovered, 395. 

Gordian, appointed emperor, 69 — his reign, 
70— his death. 72. 

Goths, first appearance of the, 98 — ad- 
mitted within the empire, 99. 

Gothia. the Marquises of, 205. 

Granada, loss of, by the Moors, 403. 

Great Britain, the union of, 502. See Eng- 
land. 

Great Rebellion, origin and history of the, 
467 et seq. 

Greek fire, the, 166. 

Gregory the Great, Pope, 133. 

Gregory VII., (Hildebrand,) career, &c. of, 
249 et seq., 255 et seq. See Hildebrand. 

Gregory IX., persecution of the Albigenses 
under, 805. 

Guienne, how acquired by England, 286. 

Guinegate, the battle of, 418. 

Gunpowder, influence of discovery of, 342. 

Guthrum,. alliance of, with Alfred, 215. 

Guttenberg, the invention of printing by, 
390— printing of the Bible by, 422. 

Hadrian. See Adrian. 

Hair, distinction from the, among the 

Franks, 152. 
Harfleur, siege of, by Henry V., 378. 
Harold of the Fair Hair, the reign of, 213. 
Hastings the Dane, defeated by Alfred, 216 

— enters the service of France, 224. 
Heathenism, Julian's attempt to restore, 

95 et seq. 
Hegira, the, 157. 

Helena, the mother of Constantine, 86. 
Heliogabalus, the reign of. 66. 
Helvoet Sluys. battle of, 355. 
Henrietta Maria, unpopularity of, 466. 
Henry I., acquisition of Normandy by, 285. 
Henry II., claims of, on France, 286 — 

character of, 2S8 — and A-Beckett, 289 et 

seq. — his death, 294. 
Henry III., reign of, in England, 311. 
Henry IV., divided state of England under, 

365. 
Henry V., persecution of the Lollards 

under, 365, 366 — invasion of France by, 

377 — captures Harfleur, 378 — battle of 

Agincourt, 381— his death, 384. 
Henry VI. recognised as King of France, 

384. 
Henry VII., character, &c. of. 371 — 

treasure accumulated by, and how, 

404. 
Henry VIII., accession and character of, 

4u4— declares war against France, 412 — 

triumphs of, in 1513, 418 — controversy of, 



with Luther. 426 — throws off the papal 
supremacy, 430 — death of, 431. 

Henry III. of France, the murder of, 448. 

Henry, the emperor, 237. 

Henry IV. of Germany, attacks of Hilde- 
brand on, 256 — the struggle between 
them, 257 et seq. — the death of, 260. 

Heptarchy, the, 120 — subjugation of the, 
by Egbert, 193, 194. 

Heraclius, Emperor of the East, 158. 

Heresies, various, of the thirteenth cen- 
tury, 298. 

Heretics, first crusade against the, 302 et 
seq.— first law against, in England, 365. 

Highlanders, the, in the Forty-Five, 510. 

Hildebrand, the career, &c. of, 249 et seq., 
255 et seq. — his struggle with the em- 
peror. 257 et seq. — his death, 259. 

Hippo subdued by the Saracens, 166. 

Hira subjugated by the Mohammedans, 
162. 

History, uses of, and difficulties of study- 
ing it from its extent, 11. 

Holland, increasing commerce of, 412 — tho 
colonies of, 454. 

Holy Land, the first Crusade to the, 262 — 
and last, 317. 

Honorius, the emperor, 101 — besieged by 
Alaric, 105 — murders Stilicho, 106. 

Hugh Capet, accession of, to the French 
throne, 231— his policy, 232. 

Hugh the Great, Count of Vermandois, 
263. 

Huguenots, the, the revocation of the Edict 
of Nantes, 483. 

Huns, first appearance of the, 99. 

Huss, the martyrdom of, 367. 

Iconoclast emperor, the. 185. 

Images, defence, &c. of, 185 et seq. 

Immaculate conception, dogma of the, 2S3. 

India, Vasco da Gama's voyage to, 401 — 
effect of the new route to, on Venice, 
412 — rise of the British power in, 491, 
514 et seq. 

Indulgences, protest of Luther against, 425. 

Innocent III., originates the crusade 
against the Albigenses, 302 et seq.— ex- 
communication of John by. 307, 310. 

Innovation, general tendency to, during 
eighteenth century, 493 et seq. 

Inquiry, commencement bf, with Scotus 
Erigena, 207 — rise of, with the Crusades, 
280. 

Inquisition, the, established Tinder Do- 
minic. 304. 

Intellect, direction of, in the present cen- 
tury, 13. 

Invention, the present century distin- 
guished by, 13. 

Investiture, claims of Hildebrand regard- 
ing, 257 et seq. 

Irish Church, the early, its state, &c, 156. 

Isabella, queen of Charles VI., profligacy 
of, 362. 

Italy, ravaged by Attila, 110— irruption 
of the Lombards into, 129 — state of, in 
seventh century, 141 — divided state of, 



INDEX. 



533 



155 — state of, during the tenth century, 
235 — conquests of the Normans in, 254 
— rise of the republics of, 277 — state of, 
before the Reformation, 420. 

Jacobite songs, the. 510. 

Jacques de Molay, death of, 339. 

James I., England under, 455 — influence 
of his character, &c, 458 — his conduct 
towards the Elector Palatine, 464 — his 
attempt to introduce Episcopacy into 
Scotland, 464. 

James II., persecution of the Covenanters 
by, 473 — accession of, in England, and 
his dethronement, 4S5 — death of, 498. 

•lames III., the rebellion in favour of, 503. 

James IV. of Scotland married to Margaret 
of England, 414 — the battle of Flodden, 
416. 

Jamestown, the first English settlement in 
America, 454. 

Jerome, the martyrdom of, 367. 

Jerusalem, importance given by Chris- 
tianity to, 17 — tbe capture and destruc- 
tion of, 30 et seq. — named iElia Capi- 
tolina by Adrian, 47 — taken by the 
Saracens, 162 — commencement of pil- 
grimage to, 260 — the capture of, by the 
Crusaders, 266 — the kingdom of, 266. 

Jervis, the victories of, 525. 

Jesuits, institution and influence of the, 
435. 

Jews, the dispersion of the, 30 et seq. — 
their rebellion against Adrian, 46 — cru- 
sade against the, 251 — spoliation of, by 
Philip le Bel, 333. 

Joan of Arc, history of, 386 et seq. — her 
death, 390. 

John, (of England,) character of, 2 ? 8 — 
state of England under, 291 — excommu- 
nication, &c. of, 307— signs Magna 
Charta, 308 — his attempt to evade the 
charter, 310. 

John, i,of France,) the treatment of, by Ed- 
ward the Black Prince, 349 — his capture 
at Poictiers and ransom, 356. 

John XII., Pope, 236. 

John, Duke of Burgundy, 361 — murders 
Louis of Orleans, 362— assumes the re- 
gency, 363 — rule of. in Prance, 376. 

John, Bishop of Constantinople, supremacy 
claimed by, 133. 

Jovian, the emperor, 97. 

Jubilee, the, in 1300, 325. 

Julian the Apostate, reign and character of, 
93 et seq. 

Julius II., character of, 408 — acquisitions 
from Venice, 410 — declares war against 
Fiance, &c, 410 — impression made on 
Luther by, 424. 

Justinian, efforts of, to recover Italy, 124 
— internal government of, 134 — his law- 
re forms, 135 et sej. — re-introduction of 
code of, 297. 

Khaled. the lieutenant of Mohammed, 158 

—his exploits, 162— and death, 1G3. 
Kieff, the kingdom of, 213. 



Kilmich, murder of Alboin by, 130. 
Kingdoms, modern, rise of, 190. 
Klodwig or Clovis, accession of, in France, 

119. See Clovis. 
Knight, position, &c. of the, 334, 335. 
Knighthood, decay of, 333, 341. 

Lally, Count, the execution of, 516. 

Land, grants of, and system these origi- 
nate, 149. 

Lanfianc, Archbishop of Canterbury, 247 — 
defends transubstantiation, 247. 

Languedoc, the Albigenses in, 299 — extir- 
pation of the Albigenses in, 304 — peace 
of, 305. 

Laud, Archbishop, 467 — execution of, 468. 

Law, the reform of, bj Justinian, 135. 

Laws, great increase of. in Rome, 67. 

Lea, defeat of the Danes at the, 216. 

Learning, advancement of, during the 
eleventh century, 246 et seq. 

Leo the Iconoclast, 185. 

Leo. Pope, Rome saved from Attila by, 110. 

Leo X., character of, 407 — influence of, on 
the Reformation, 425. 

Leuds or Feudatories, the, 149 — their 
struggle with the crowu, 150 et seq. 

Libraries, early, 372. 

Liege, massacre at, by John the Fearless, 
363. 

Literature, revival of, with Dante, &c, 
344 — the modern, of England. 345 — slow 
diffusion of, before printing, 372 — French, 
under Louis XIV., 481 — English, during 
the eighteenth century, 506. 

Lombards, or Longobards, irruption of the, 
129 et seq. — character and polity of the, 
131 et seq. 

Long Parliament, the, 468. 

Lothaire, son of Louis the Debonnaire, 
201, 202, 203— emperor, 204. 

Louis, origin of name of, 120. 

Louis the Debonnaire, reign of, 200. 

Louis, son of Louis the Debonnaire, 201. 

Louis VII. heads the second Crusade, 284 — 
divorces his wife, 286. 

Louis VIII., crusade against the Albi- 
genses under, 304. 

Louis IX., crusade against the Albigenses 
under, 304 — character and reign of, 311 
et seq. — seventh Crusade under, 317 — pri- 
soner and ransomed. 317 — his death, 318. 

Louis XI. first despotic King of France, 
371. 

Louis XII., a party to the league of Cam- 
brai, 409 — war with the Pope, 411 — ex- 
pelled from Italy, 412. 

Louis XIII., reign of, in France, 476. 

Louis XIV., accession of, 469 — rise of, as 
the absolute king, 475 el seq. — the acces- 
sion, policy, and reign of, 479 — private 
life of, 482 — the revocation of the Edict 
of Nantes, 4S3 — his reception, Ac. of 
James II., 485, 486 — his successes in 
war, 480 — peace of Ryswick, 4S7 — the 
war of the Succession, 498 et seq. — the 
peace of Utrecht, 502. 

Louis XVI.. the execution of, 524. 



45* 



534 



INDEX. 



Louis of Orleans, struggle of, with John of 
Burgundy, 361 — his murder, 302. 

Lower classes, how regarded by the Cru- 
saders, 271. 

Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, 406 
— character of, and -institution of the 
Jesuits by, 434. 

Luitprand.King of Lombardy, 1S2, 183. 

Luther, early life of, 406 — the rise and 
career of, 423 et seq. — death of, 431. 

Lutherans and Calvinists, hatred between, 
460. 

Luxembourg, the marshal, 481 — the vic- 
tories of, 486. 

Macrinus, the emperor, 66. 

Magdeburg, the sack of, 466. 

Magna Charta, effects of, 306, 308— its con- 
ditions, 308 et seq. 

Magyars, first appearance of the, 99. 

Mahomet. See Mohammed. 

Maid of Norway, the, 319. 

Maintenon, Madame de, married to Louis 
XIV., 482. 

Marcus Aurelius, accession and reign of, 
50 et seq. 

Marlborough, the victories of, 499 et seq. 

Martin V., Pope, 368. 

Mary, the reign of, in England, 433. 

Mary of Scotland, policy of Elizabeth to- 
ward, 437 et seq. — defence of her execu- 
tion, 439, 443. 

Mary de Medicis, position of, in France, 
475. 

Matilda, the countess, 255, 258. 

Maximilian, the emperor, a party to the 
league of Cambrai, 409 — hostilities with 
the Pope, 411 — proposed as his successor, 
411 — turns against the French, 412 — in 
the pay of Henry VIII., 418 — and Luther, 
426. 

Maximian, the emperor, 75 — abdicates, 76. 

Maximin, the accession and reign of, 68. 

Maximus, appointment of, 69 — his death, 
70. 

Mayors of the palace, origin of the, 150 — 
powers, &c. of the, 176. 

Mazarin, the cardinal, the policy, &c. of, 
478— his death, 479. 

Mecca, capture of, by Mohammed, 158. 

Mediterranean, supremacy of Rome over 
the, 56 — diminished importance of the, 
413. 

Meroveg, King of the Franks, 110. 

Messalina, the empress, 20 — her death. 22. 

Mexico, conquest of, by the Spaniards, 404. 

Michel et, picture of France in the ninth 
century by, 208. 

Middle Ages, commencement of the, 131. 

Middle class, destruction of the, under the 
Roman emperors, 90. 

Milan, sack of, by the Franks, &c, 124. 

Military spirit, strength of the, in Eng- 
land, 496. 

Military strength, the. of ancient Rome 
and modern Europe, 56 et seq. 

Minorca coded to England, 502. 

Mirandola, .Julius 11. al siege of, 410. 



Mohammed, birth and career of, 138 — 
death of, 159 — his successors, 159 et seq. 

Mohammedanism, commencing struggle 
of, with Christianity, 141 — progress of, 
157 et seq. — first arrested by battle of 
Tours, 179 — resemblances between, and 
Catholicism, 271. 

Monarchical principle, restoration of the, 
with Pepin, 183. 

Monasteries, influence of, on agricTilture, 
143 — their intelligence, &c, 146 — com- 
mencement of corruption, 147 — the early 
English, 173 — reformation of, by St. 
Benedict, 200 — state of the, during the 
tenth century, 221 — number of, in France, 
244— dissolution of the, in England, 430. 

Monks, the early, 115 — industry, &c. of. 
142 et seq. — the early English, 172, 173 
— gluttony, &c. of the, 274— degeneracy 
of in the thirteenth century, 314. 

Moors, final loss of Spain by the, 403. 

Municipalities, rise of the, 277 — their grow- 
ing importance, 279. 

Murder, fines for, among the Franks, 152. 

Music, encouragement of, by Charlemagne, 
197. 

Nantes, edict of, its revocation, 483. 

Napoleon, the rise, &c. of, 525. 

Narses, exploits of, in Italy, 127. 

National debt, the English, its growth, 493. 

Navareta, the battle of, 351. 

Navies of Modern Europe, the, 57 et seq. 

Nelson, the victories of, 525. 

Netherlands, Alva's cruelties in the, 441. 

Nero, character and reign of, 22. 

Nerva, the emperor, 42, 44. 

Neustria, kingdom of, 155. 

Nice, the Council of, 92. 

Nicea taken by the Crusaders, 264. 

Nicene creed, the, 92. 

Nicholas Breakspear becomes pope. 289. 

Niger, a candidate for the empire, 60. 

Nobility, new, originated by Constantine, 
87 — collision between, and the Church, 
153 — policy of Hugh Capet towards the, 
232 — effects of the Crusades on the, 276 — 
conditions of Magna Charta regarding 
the. 308— decline of the. 359 et seq. — 
policy of Richelieu against the, 476 et 
seq. — the French, at the time of the Revo- 
lution, 523. 

Nogaret, Chancellor of France, 329. 

Nominalists, rise of the, 248. 

Normans, the conquest of England by the, 
253— feeling against the, in England, 
292. 

Norman kings, character of the, 288. 

Normandy, settlement of the Normans in, 
222 et seq. — power of the dukes, 232. 

Norsemen, Charlemagne's prescience re- 
garding the, 197 — progress of the. in 
the ninth century, 208— their invasions 
of England, 212 et seq. — result." of the 
settlements of the. in France, 219— set- 
tlement under Rollo, 222 et seq. 

North America, the English colonization 
of, 454. 



INDEX. 



535 



Novella 1 of Justinian, the, 136. 

Kovatian and Cornelius, the schism be- 
tween, 78. 

Novgorod, the kingdom of, 213. 

Nunneries, reformation of, by St. Benedict, 
200— of the twelfth century, the, 283. 

Odoacer, King of Italy, 111 — overthrow of, 

118. 
Omar, the lieutenant of Mohammed, 158, 

100 — chosen caliph, 162 — destruction of 

the Alexandrian library, 164 — his habits, 

163, 165. 
Orleans, the siege of, 385 — relieved by Joan 

of Arc. 387 et seq. 
Ostrogoths, overthrow of the, in Italy, 

127. 
Otho, the emperor, 24. 
Otho the Great, the emperor, 234. 

Padua, destroyed by Attila, 110. 

Palos, the return of Columbus to, 397. 

Palestine, eagerness for news from, during 
the Crusades, 275. 

Pandects of Justinian, the, 136. 

Pantheism, form of, in the thirteenth cen- 
tury, 298. 

Papacy, the, state of, during the tenth cen- 
tury, 220, 235 — supremacy of, under Hil- 
debrand, 250 et seq. — general subjection 
to, 289 — triumphs of, in the thirteenth 
century, 314 — diminished consideration 
of, 325 — struggle of Philip the Handsome 
with, 326 et seq. — the schism in, 342 — 
state of, in the fifteenth century, 369. 

Papal supremacy, the, abjured by Eng- 
land, 430. 

Taper, first manufacture of, from rags, 
392. 

Paris, state of, under John the Fearless, 
364 — the massacre of St. Bartholomew 
in. 442. 

Parliament, first summoned in England, 
313 — concessions wrung from Edward 1. 
by, 320. 

Parliaments, the French, what, 312. 

Party libels, prevalence of, under Walpole, 
50."). 

Passau, the treaty of, 431. 

Peasantry, the, insurrection of, during 
fourteenth century, 356 — state of, dur- 
ing fifteenth century, 374 et seq. — the 
French, before the Revolution, 521. 

People, state of the, under the early em- 
perors, 34 et seq. — conditions of Magna 
Charta regarding the, 309. 

Pepin, accession of, 182 — crowned king, 
183. 

Persia, new monarchy of, 71 — subdued by 
the Mohammedans, 165. 

Pertinax, accession and murder of. 59. 

Pestilence, frequency of, during the tenth 
century, 236. 

Peter the Hermit, preaches the first Cru- 
sade, 262. 

Peterborough, Lord, the victories of, in 
Spain, 501. 

Petrarch, the wwfcs of, 344, 346. 



Philip, the emperor, 72. 

Philip I. of France, attacks of Hildebrand 
on, 256. 

Philip le Bel, struggle of, with Boniface 
VIII., 326 et seq.— arrests the latter, 329 
et seq. — poisons Benedict XL, 331 — se- 
cures election of Bernard de Goth, 331 
— the persecution of the. Templars, 337 
et seq. 

Philip VI., war with Edward III., 355. 

Philip II., accession of, 432 — the Spanish 
Armada, 444. 

Philip of Valois, the victory of, at Cassel, 
353. 

Philip Augustus, conquest of the English 
possessions by, 305. 

Pinkie, the battle of, 415. 

Pitt, (Lord Chatham,) the ministry of, 
513. 

Plague of Florence, the, 356. 

Plantagenets, character of the, 288. 

Plassey, the battle of, 513, 516. 

Pococke, Admiral, exploits of, in the East, 
516. 

Poictiers, the battle of, 356. 

Poitou, how acquired by England, 286. 

Poland, the partition of, 492. 

Polemo, a philosopher, anecdote of, 50. 

Pompeia Plotina, wife of Trajan, 45. 

Pondicherry, the capture of, by the Eng- 
lish, 516. 

Poor, relations of the Church to the, 274. 

Pope, the claims to supremacy of, 132 et 
seq. — efforts of the early English monks 
on behalf of, 172, 173 — his position in 
the eighth century, 174, 175 — alliance, 
fee. between Charles Martel and, 182 — 
crowns Pepin, 183 — supremacy of, after 
Hildebrand. 259 — the revolt of Arnold of 
Brescia against, 278 — his supremacy de- 
nied by the Albigenses, 299 — position, 
&c. of, before the Reformation, 420. 

Popes, the, the claims of supremacy by, 
148 — increasing supremacy of, 133 — in- 
creasing pretensions of, 186, 190 — subser- 
vience of, to France, 342 — the rival, 342. 

Popular assemblies, early, 151. 

Portugal, maritime discoveries of, 395 — in- 
creasing naval power of, 412. 

Praetorian Guards, sale of the empire by 
the, 59. 

Printing, influences of, 14 — discovery of, 
and its effects, 373, 391 — growing im- 
portance of discovery of, 402. 

Probus, the emperor, 72 — his conquests 
and policy, 73. 

Protestantism, influence of, 402 — establish- 
ment of, by treaty of Passau, 431 — esta- 
blished in England under Elizabeth, 436 
et seq. 

Protestants, the, expelled from France, 
484. 

Provencal dialect, disappearance of the, 
304. 

Prussia, rise of. during eighteenth cen- 
tury, 491, 492 — the seven years' war, 
512, 

Puritanism, origin, Ac. of, in England, 



536 



INDEX. 



456 d seq., 464 — growing tendency to, 
466. 

Quebec, the battle of, 513. 

Raleigh, the naval exploits of, 452. 

Ravenna, the Exarch of, 137 — the exarchate 
of, 177 — transferred to the Pope, 183* 

Raymond of Toulouse, the leader of the 
Albigenses, 299. 

Raymond VII., Count of Toulouse, 303 — 
deprived of his possessions, 306. 

Realists, rise of the, 248. 

Rebellion of 1715, the, 504— and of 1745, 
507. 

Reformation, influences of the, 14 — su- 
preme importance of, 419 — state of the 
Church before it, 419 et seq. — the rise of 
the, 422 et seq. 

Regner Lodbrog, 214. 

Relics, the system of, 262 — passion for, 
during the Crusades, 276. 

Religion, state of, during the tenth cen- 
tury, 219 — in the thirteenth century, 
298 — before the Reformation, 422. 

Republics, the Italian, rise of, 277. 

Revolution of 1688, the, 485. 

Rheims, coronation of Charles VII. at, 
388. 

Richard Coeur de Lion, character of, 288 — 
heads the third Crusade, 285. 

Richelieu, Cardinal, 449 — the policy of, 
and its results, 476 et seq. — the death of, 
468. 

Robert of Normandy, the Crusader, 263 — 
loss of Normandy by, 285 — a prisoner in 
England, 286. 

Robert, son of Hugh Capet, 237. 

Robert Guiscard, conquests of, in Italy, 
254 — sack of Rome by, 258. 

Rochelle, the capture of, from the Hugue- 
nots, 476, 477. 

Rois faineants, the, 175, 176. 

Rollo. settlement of. in Normandy, 222 et 
seq. — created Duke of Normandy, 225 et 
seq. 

Romans, the conquest of England by, and 
its effects, 21 — passion of, for gladiatorial 
shows, 34. 

Roman empire, first broken in on by the 
barbarians, 51 — its extent and forces, 56 
— compared with modern Europe, 57 et 
Sfiq. — divided into East and West, 97. 

Roman law, reintroduction of, in Europe, 
297. 

Rome, the supremacy of, the characteristic 
of the first century, 16 — power of the 
emperor, 20 — state of, during the first 
century, 35 — increasing weakness of, 79 
et seq. — removal of the seat of empire 
from, 84 — the sank of, by Alaric, lu6 — 
sacked by the Vandals, 111 — causes of 
her fall, 111 etseq. — recovered l>v Belisa- 
rius, 121— taken, Ac. by Totila, 125— 
supremacy of the Bishop of, 126 et seq. — 
fallen state of, in the sixth century, 133 
— the Bishops of, claim supremacy, 148 
■ — influence of the unity of, 184— state 



of, during the tenth century, 235— 
sack of, by the Normans, 258 — the 
Crusaders at, 262 — Arnold of Brescia in, 
278— jubilee at, 1300, 325— state of, be- 
fore the Reformation, 420 — Luther at, 
424. 

Romish Church, influence of the Jesuits 
on, 434 et seq. — rejoicings of, on massacre 
of St. Bartholomew, 442. 

Romulus Augustulus, the emperor, 111. 

Rosamund, wife of Alboin, 129. 

Roses, the wars of the, 393 — effects of, on 
the nobility. 360. 

Rouen, occupied by the Normans, 222 — 
execution of Joan of Arc at, 390. 

Royal power, general consolidation of, in 
the fifteenth century, 370. 

Russia, the Danes in, 213 — rise of, during 
eighteenth century, 491, 492 — the seven 
years' war, 512. 

St. Bartholomew, the massacre of, 442 — its 
effects, 442. 

St. Benedict, industry, &c. inculcated by, 
142, 143— the second, 200. 

St. Bernard on the luxury, &c. of the 
clergy, 274 — discussions of, with Abelard, 
281 — the second Crusade originated by, 
284. 

St. Boniface, coronation of Pepin by, 183. 

St. Columba, and Brunch ild, 150. 

St. Dominic. See Dominic. 

St. Francis of Assisi, 315. 

St. Louis. See Louis IX. 

St. Remi, Clovis baptized by, 119. 

Sapor, the capture of Valerian by, 72 — 
death of Julian in war with, 96. 

Saracens, the, the conquests of, 162 et seq. — 
their defeat by Charles Martel, 176, 179 
et seq. — in Spain, 246 — crusade against, 
in Italy, 251 — in Palestine, 270, 271. 

Sarmatians, the, 71. 

Sassanides, dynasty of, 71. 

Saxons, feeling of the, towards the Nor- 
mans in England, 292. 

Saxony, the Elector of, and Luther, 426, 
428. 

Scholastic philosophy, rise of the, 247. 

Schools, establishment of, under Charle- 
magne, 195. 

Scotland, state of, in the eighth century, 
171, 172 — resistance to the papacy in, 314 
• — Edward I.'s attempt on, 319 et sen. — the 
battle of Banuockburn, 352 — the ballads 
of, 372 — effects of battle of Flodden in, 
414, 418 — its subsequent state, 415 et stq. 
— the policy of Elizabeth in, 437 et seq. — 
James's attempt, to force Episcopacy on, 
464 — persecution of the Covenanters in, 
473 — the Union Act, 502 — the rebellion 
of 1715, 504— and of 1745, 507. 

Scotus Erigena, career, &c. of, 207. 

Septimania, power of the Dukes of, 204. 

Serfs, conditions of Magna Charta regard- 
ing the, 309. 

Seven years' war, the, 512. 

Severn s, Alexander, accession and reign of, 
67. 



INDEX. 



537 



gevevus, Sep timius, accession and reign of, 
60 et seq. 

Sicily, conquest of, by the Normans, 255. 

Simon de Montfort, the crusade against 
the Albigenses under, 302 — his death, 
303. 

Simon de Montfort, summoning of parlia- 
ment by, 313. 

Sixtus V., approval of the murder of 
Henry III. by. 418. 

Slaves, state of the, under the Romans, 35, 
90. 

Smalcalde, the Protestant league of, 429. 

Society, state of, under James I., 455. 

Solway Moss, the battle of, 414. 

South Sea bubble, the, 505. 

Spain, severance of, from the Roman em- 
pire, 108 — the Saracens in, 246— threat- 
ened predominance of, in sixteenth cen- 
tury, 402 — its increasing importance; 403 
— increasing naval power of, 412 — con- 
solidation of, in the sixteenth century, 
413 — continued hostilities with, at sea, 
451 — the attacks of the buccaneers on 
her colonies, &c, 452. 

Spanish Armada, the. and its defeat, 444. 

Spanish Succession, the war of the, 498 et 
scq. 

Spurs, the battle of the, at Courtrai, 336 — 
at Guiuegate, 418. 

Staupitz, connection of, with Luther, 423. 

Stephen, the wars of, in Eugland, 292. 

Stilicho, opposed to Alaric, 101, 105 — his 
murder, 106. 

Strafford, execution of, 468. 

Succession, the war of the, 498 el seq. 

Sulpician, a candidate for the empire, 59. 

Supino, betrayal of Anagni by, 328. 

Surenus, minister of Trajan, 45. 

Surrey, the Earl of, at Flodden, 416. 

Switzerland, ingi-ess of French Protestants 
into, 484. 

Sylvester II., Pope, 238, 242— his charac- 
ter, &c, 246. 

Syria,, progress of Mohammedanism in, 
158, 161. 

Talbot, raises the siege of Orleans, 387. 

Tancho, the invention of bells by, 196. 

Taxes, system of collecting, under Coustan- 
tine, 89. 

Taylor, Rowland, the martyr, 433. 

Tchuda, check of the Saracens at, 166. 

Templars, the destruction of the, 337 et 
seq. — the charges against them, 340. 

Tetzel, the sale of indulgences by, 425. 

Theodora, wile of Justinian, 134. 

Theodoric the Goth, at the battle of Cha- 
lons, 110. 

Theodoric, the reign of, 119 — his supre- 
macy, 123 — his death, 123. 

Theodosius. the emperor, 101. 

Tiberius, the reign of, 18 — his character, 
19. 

Tilly, the sack of Magdeburg by, 466. 

Timbuctoo, expedition by Englishmen to. 
452. 

Tinchebray, the battle of, 286. 



Titus, the reign of, 2S — the siege and cap- 
ture of Jerusalem, 30 et seq. 

Torstenson, the victories of. 468. 

Totila, King of the Goths, 125, 127. 

Toiilouse, the Marquises of, 205 — power of 
the Dukes of, 232 — the Albigenses in, 299. 

Tours, the battle of, 179 et scq. 

Towns, effect of the Crusades on the, 273, 
277 — increasing power of the, in the four- 
teenth century, 334. 

Trajan, the accession and reign of, 42, 44 et 
seq. 

Transubstantiation, doctrine of, 247. 

Trebonian, the Justinian code drawn up 
by, 136. 

Tripoli, conquered by the Saracens, 167. 

Troubadours, attacks on the clergy by the, 
300. 

Truce of God, the, 238. 

Tunis, crusade of Louis IX. against, 318. 

Turenne, the victories of, 478, 481. 

Union Act, passing of the, 502. 

United States, the revolt of the, 518 et seq. 

Universal church, belief in a, before the 

Reformation, 419. 
Urban II. and the first Crusaders, 262. 
Utrecht, the peace of, 502. 

Valens, the emperor, 97 — his defeat and 

death, 100. 
Valentinian, the emperor, 97. 
Valerian, the emperor, 72. 
Vandals, conquest of Africa by the, 108 — 

sack of Rome by the. Ill — overthrow of 

the, by Belisarius, 124. 
Vasco da Gama, the discovery of the route 

to India by, 401. 
Venaissin, acquisition of, by the Pope, 306. 
Venice, rise of, 277 — power, &c. of, 407 — 

attacked by Julius II., 408 — league of 

Cambrai, 409 — decay of the power of, 412. 
Veroni destroyed by Attila, 110. 
Versailles, Louis XIV. at, 481 — its cost, 

483— the peace of, 520. 
Vespasian, accession of, 24. 
Vicenza, taken by Attila, 110. 
Vidius Pollio, anecdote of, 36. 
Vikinger, the. 208. 
Virginia, settlement of, by the English, 

454. 
Visigoths, settlements of the, in Spain, &c, 

128. 
Vitellius, the emperor, 24. 

Wales, early state of, 171, 172. 
Wallace, the victories, <fcc. of, 320. 
Walpole. Sir R., the ministry of, 505. 
Wart burg, seclusion of Luther at, 428. 
Wealth, influence of the Crusades on, 272. 
Wellington, the victories of. in India, 525. 
Wenilon, Bishop of Sens, 206. 
Wentworth, execution of. 46S. 
Western Church, severance of the Eastern 

from, 133. 
Wiekliff, his translation of the Bible, 342. 
WicUliffites. persecution of the. 365. 
William of Normandy, churches, &c. 



5s8 



INDEX. 



erected bv, 244 — the conquest of Eng- 
land by. 253— character of, 288. 

Wiiliam Ruf'us, character of, 288. 

William III., accession of, in England, 
485— his reign, 486— the death of, 499. 

Winchester, the Bishop of, 384. 

Winifried, the monk, 175. 

W T itig, King of the Ostrogoths, 124 — his 
overthrow, 125. 



Wittenagemot, the, 151. 
Wolfe, the conquest of Canada by, 517. 
Woman, increased respect paid to, 283. 
Worms, the Diet of, Luther before. 427 

Yeomanry, rise of, in England, 431. 
Yezdegard, King of Persia, 162, 165. 

Zorndorf, the battle of, 513. 



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